Great story about how a selfie uncovered a giant water lily on the brink of extinction - The Guardian

Blaming our scholars is apparently easier than funding science.

Such investigations will be essential to determine whether engineering the OsPSY8 pathway can improve drought resilience while maintaining crop productivity under agronomically relevant conditions. Congratulations Yejin!

To translate these mechanistic insights into crop improvement strategies, future studies should investigate how modulation of OsPSY8 signaling affects plant performance under soil-grown conditions, including greenhouse and field environments.

Yejin then showed that OsPSY8 is directly repressed by OsWRKY24, a transcription factor previously shown to positively regulate resistance against Magnaporthe grisea, the causal agent of rice blast disease.

Yejin made knockouts in rice PSY8 and found that two independent mutants displayed enhanced tolerance to osmotic stress. Survival rates exceeded 60% in both KO1 and KO2, compared with approximately 40% in WT plants

These studies raised the question: what is the function of PSY in rice? Our new PNAS study shows that rice PSY8 promotes root growth under favorable conditions but is repressed during osmotic stress, allowing rice to shift from growth to stress adaptation.

In Arabidopsis, these receptors represses plant growth and activate stress-response genes when they are not repressed by their peptide hormone ligands.https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq5735

Bacterial RaxX competes effectively with plant PSY in binding to the PSY receptors, PSYR2 and PSYR3, indicating that RaxX is also perceived by PSYRs in Arabidopsis.

A synthetic sulfated RaxX derivative comprising 13 residues, highly conserved between RaxX and PSY, induces root growth in Arabidopsis and rice in a manner similar to that triggered by PSY. A Xanthomonas strain lacking raxX is impaired in virulence.

What is the molecule recognized by XA21? Rory Pruitt led the identification of a gene, called RaxX (required for activation of XA21-mediated immunity) encoding a small sulfated peptide.