Excited to share our latest work! 🍅 Two evolutionarily distinct immune receptors recognize the same viral target, yet differ in their recognition spectra. A fascinating example of convergent evolution in plant immunity!

Very pretty!

Thanks! Totally slipped my mind

Thanks a lot Şuayb!

Very happy to have this out! Only time will tell where we can go further :) I hope you will enjoy reading both our NOV focused paper and the Tiamat focused paper.

We also found similar but different proteins in Arabidopsis: two uncharacterized zinc-finger domain proteins. These, NOV and Tiamat all belong to a superfamily of Sacsin-like proteins, structurally related to a human ataxia protein. A very interesting protein family! 10/n

As we found a Tiamat homolog in plants, we also wondered if it's present outside plants as well. We found that NOV with its long N-terminal extension, was also present in other eukaryotes. RNA binding domain acquisitions in fish suggests that it might play some regulatory role there as well. 9/n

NOV reduction results in an impaired capacity to induce certain transcriptional changes needed for proper viral response. We think that the reason NOV mutants fail to develop is due to a similar function, building on Tsugeki's hypothesis that NOV mediates cellular reprogramming. 8/n

TRV was not affected in this interaction, but we observed a striking effect of NOV silencing on the expression patterns of certain classes of genes. While heat shock proteins stayed consistently upregulated in both infections, the plants appeared to be deficient in inducing key defense genes. 7/n

We suspected that the reason we observed a PVX increase was due to changes in the plants' capacity to react to it. Silencing NOV involved infecting plants with a TRV vector, and a prior infection could increase systemic resistance - which it seemed like compared to the uninfected control. 6/n

We decided to directly test if NOV had a role in host-virus interaction by using our favorite plant-virus model system benthi. By silencing NOV in seedlings, then infecting the grown plants with certain viruses, we saw that potato virus x accumulation strongly increased! 5/n

NO-VEIN was named by Ryuji Tsugeki and colleagues in 2009, mainly due to its leaf-vein defective phenotype in Arabidopsis when mutated - but stronger mutations lead to embryo lethality. However, no role in plant immunity had been associated to NOV. 4/n

Within the 2729 amino acid long protein NOV, we find strong conservation of multiple domains from the 1500 amino acid long bacterial defense system Tiamat. The mechanism of Tiamat is yet unknown, but it's likely involved in nucleic acid interaction, based on its nuclease domain. 3/n

This builds on a recent explosion of bacterial anti-phage defense systems, some of which were conserved in animals - termed ancestral immunity proteins. In this study we explored a surprisingly strong conservation signature between the defense system Tiamat and the plant protein NOV. 2/n