Erin Baggs involved in recent publication on diversification of plant immune receptors

DTP student Erin Baggs, based at the Earlham Institute, was involved in a recent publication looking in to the diversification of plant immune receptors.

The plant immune system is innate and encoded in the germline. Using it efficiently, plants are capable of recognizing a diverse range of rapidly evolving pathogens. A recently described phenomenon shows that plant immune receptors are able to recognize pathogen effectors through the acquisition of exogenous protein domains from other plant genes.

This research shows that plant immune receptors with integrated domains are distributed unevenly across their phylogeny in grasses.

Erin worked with her co-authors and helped with the annotation of the NLRs from different grass proteomes as well as being involved in the annotation and presentation of the phylogenies and the general paper discussion process.

For full details of the paper see here