Research Highlights

An international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research and the University of Åarhus in Denmark have discovered that bacteria from the plant microbiota are adapted to their host species. In a newly published study, they show how root-associated bacteria have a competitive advantage when colonizing their native host, which allows them to invade an already established microbiota. [more]

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research (MPIPZ) have discovered that signalling occurring from the response of plant leaves to light, and plant roots to microbes, is integrated along a microbiota-root-shoot axis to boost plant growth when light conditions are suboptimal. [more]

Scientists from MPIPZ in collaboration with the Sainsbury Laboratory (UK) find a long sought after complex between two conserved plant-specific protein families that connect pathogen-activated immune complexes to defence outputs. [more]

A collaborative study on a plant intracellular immune receptor from researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research (MPIPZ) also reveals some common operational principles with immunity proteins from humans. [more]

Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research (MPIPZ) and University of Cologne researcher Takaki Maekawa and colleagues have discovered that plants have independently evolved a family of immune proteins that are strikingly similar to animals. [more]

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research have found that, faced with limiting iron, plants direct their microbiota to mobilise this essential nutrient for optimal growth. [more]

By analysing the different layers of bacterial gene expression during pathogen infection of a plant host, Kenichi Tsuda and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany and Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, China have revealed new insights into bacterial gene regulation as well as the strategies employed by plants to target key bacterial processes. [more]