Sophien Kamoun - Plant immunity : filling the gap between evolutionary and mechanistic studies

[Transdisciplinary Thursdays #1] Sophien Kamoun
Plant immunity: filling the gap between evolutionary and mechanistic studies

« Plants can get sick too. In fact, they get infected by all types of microbes and little critters. But plants have evolved an effective immune system to fight off pathogen invasion. Amazingly, nearly every single plant cell is able to protect itself and its neighbours against infections. The plant immune system gets switched on when one of its many immune receptors matches a ligand in the pathogen. As a consequence of a long evolutionary history of fighting off pathogens, immune receptors are now encoded by hundreds of genes that populate the majority of plant genomes. An understanding of how the plant immune system functions cannot be achieved without the evolutionary perspective. In this talk, I will describe a cross-disciplinary approach to studying plant immunity across different timescales. I will highlight new mechanistic perspectives that couldn’t have been achieved without the comparative approach that underpins evolutionary analyses. »