Recordings of presentations given at the 2023 IS-MPMI Congress are available to all members and those who registered to attend the congress. Explore what you missed!
IS-MPMI is part of Root & Shoot, a Research Coordination Network (RCN) that is leading cultural change in plant science through professional societies. Root & Shoot aims to create a culture of support in the plant sciences and is currently developing a cohort-based training program in culturally aware mentorship. Learn more about Root & Shoot and available opportunities.
The IS-MPMI Board of Directors recently reviewed and amended the IS-MPMI Bylaws, and members were sent a ballot to ratify the amendments. Voting is open through March 25, 2024.
Contact Linda Schmitt at IS-MPMI headquarters if you need your ballot resent to you.
Join us at the IS-MPMI Congress, July 13–17, 2025, at the Confex Conference and Exhibition Centre in Cologne, Germany, for groundbreaking research, sessions, and dialogues on molecular plant-microbe interactions. Stay tuned for updates!
Listen to the What’s New in MPMI Virtual Seminar presented by Hasna Boubakri on “A Nonspecific Lipid Transfer Protein with Potential Functions in Infection and Nodulation.”
Pathogenic ThreatsIn the February issue of Molecular Plant–Microbe Interactions, the second of the H.H. Flor Distinguished Reviews has been published, written by Chao Zhang, Yingpeng Xie, Ping He, and Libo Shan.
Zitong Yang, Gan Ai, Xinyu Lu, Yuke Li, Jinlu Miao, Wen Song, Heng Xu, Jinding Liu, Danyu Shen, and Daolong Dou
Yang et al. show how the Phytophthora sojae effector PsCRN108 suppresses plant immunity by inhibiting the expression of Heat Shock Protein (HSP) family genes, including NbHSP40, through interaction with NbCAMTA2, a negative regulator of plant immunity, shedding light on a new mechanism by which CRN effectors manipulate transcription factors to impact immunity.
Read Amelia Lovelace’s commentary about this Editor’s Pick.
Despite recent advances in molecular tools and genome sequencing, cereal crop diseases remain a significant challenge to global food security. Yield losses each year from fungi, bacteria, oomycete, viruses, and nematodes need substantial economic investment and impact the world’s poorest populations disproportionately. Climate change exacerbates the problem, altering pathogen ranges, allowing the spread of existing plant diseases into new growing areas while facilitating the emergence of new pathogenic strains. Global trade compounds the challenge of pathogen spread. Thus, there is a pressing need for a detailed understanding of the biology of cereal crop diseases, with an expectation that this will identify plant strengths and weaknesses that can be exploited to safeguard grain sources.
In this MPMI Focus Issue, we seek to draw together, through reviews and original research papers, the contemporary developments in understanding staple cereal crops and their pathogens. We encourage papers focused on pathogen, host biology, or both. Investigations should be at the molecular, cellular, and/or genomic level and may include studies of effector function and evolution, plant receptors, and pathogen physiology, as well as signal transduction. Both the topic and pathosystem of study are intended to be broad in order to best capture this important field of study. Our goal is that this issue will highlight potential solutions and significant breakthroughs in cereal crop disease research, as well as identify important knowledge gaps, that will guide future studies and ultimately foster the implementation of meaningful management practices.
Focus Issue Editors Lida Derevnina, Ksenia Krasileva, Benjamin Schwessinger, and Richard Wilson look forward to receiving your manuscripts addressing this globally important research area.
Submission Deadline: September 30, 2024
Submit a Manuscript | Instructions to Authors
A Focus Issue offers authors several benefits. A single-topic issue gives scientists an opportunity to publish alongside the related work of their peers to highlight progress in a focal area. This MPMI Focus Issue will be widely promoted and is expected to be highly cited, giving authors maximum exposure.
Papers will be submitted to Crossref, allowing citation tracking and connectivity as this research area moves forward in MPMI and other scientific journals. MPMI is indexed by PubMed, Web of Science, AGRICOLA, and Scopus, and all content is open access for readers. MPMI is approved by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and meets gold open access grant funding requirements.
If you are working on research described herein, submit your manuscript to MPMI and select “Focus Issue” as the article type. Please also indicate in your cover letter that you would like your manuscript to be considered for the 2025 Focus Issue.
For more information about the scope of this issue, please contact MPMI Editor-in-Chief Tim Friesen.
Name: Thomas Waksman
Current Position: Postdoctoral Research Assistant, Bos Group, Department of Plant Sciences, University of Dundee, UK
Education: Master’s degree in biochemistry, University of Oxford; Ph.D. in plant science, University of Glasgow
Non-scientific Interests: Nature, hiking, music
Brief Bio: My passion for nature, science, and the environment came from my parents, education, and hiking activities. From an early age, I thought I would like to be a biologist, and I enjoyed math and chemistry, so I studied for a biochemistry degree. My research activities have focused on protein structure and interactions, plant-microbe interactions and environmental signaling.
During my master’s research project, I was involved in determining the structure of the UDP-glucose:glycoprotein glucosyltransferase (UGGT). UGGT is the glycoprotein folding quality-control checkpoint in eukaryotes—it transfers glucose to short glycans in misfolded glycoproteins, causing retention and refolding of these incorrect proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum. UGGT must be able to interact with misfolds and glucosylate glycans in any misfolded glycoprotein, covering a very wide range of protein structures—this interactive adaptability is intriguing from a protein structure perspective. Multiple crystal structures of UGGT suggested how interdomain conformational flexibility allows the enzyme to cover a great range of misfold-to-glycan distances.
Initially, I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. degree in protein structure and molecular machines. However, an inspiring summer project about nitrogen-fixing symbiosis in the group of Prof. Sharon Long at Stanford University, as well as a growing desire to work in a nature and environment context, led me to plant molecular biology research. During my Ph.D. program, I investigated blue-light signaling in Arabidopsis in Prof. John Christie‘s group at the University of Glasgow. I developed a novel in vitro phosphorylation assay method for phototropin (phot) blue-light receptor kinases, based on “gatekeeper” technology in which a kinase is engineered to use an enlarged ATP analogue. Gatekeeper-engineered Arabidopsis phot was expressed in a cell-free system and used to identify thiophosphorylate substrate candidates, which is detected by immunoblotting. I discovered that NPH3/RPT2-like proteins, known to be key signaling components since phot was discovered in the 1990s, are in fact phot substrates. Phosphorylation of a conserved phosphorylation site at the protein C-terminus contributes to blue-light response in plants.
I am now finally combining my main research interests as part of the APHIDTRAP project in the group of Jorunn Bos at the University of Dundee. My aim is to determine the structure of protein complexes comprised of aphid effectors and plant-host target proteins. For my article published in the MPMI Focus Issue on effectors, properties (including structure) of effector candidate proteins found in green peach aphid saliva were computationally predicted. We realized that many of these proteins are relatively unknown to science, unpredictable, and probably contain intrinsic disorder in their structure. Some of these unusual proteins have effector activity, so I intend to study those. I would like to use mass spectrometry methods to determine the structure of the effector-target complexes at medium to high resolution, followed by computational modeling to achieve accurate structures. X-ray crystallography or electron microscopy can be used to determine high-resolution structure if necessary, after removal of disordered regions.
As part of University of Dundee Plant Sciences, I am affiliated with the James Hutton Institute, which exposes me to diverse biological science approaches applied to agriculture and the environment. In addition, volunteering in the United Kingdom’s invasive tree disease observation program (Observatree) has reinforced my regard for environmental monitoring and nature restoration. In the future, I hope to do research in the MPMI area, linking the evolution of interspecies protein complexes to ecosystems and engineering plant resistance to insect effectors for agricultural application.