MorTAL Kombat: the story of defense against TAL effectors through loss-of-susceptibility

Many plant-pathogenic xanthomonads rely on Transcription Activator-Like (TAL) effectors to colonize their host. This particular family of type III effectors functions as specific plant transcription factors via a programmable DNA-binding domain. Upon binding to the promoters of plant disease susceptibility genes in a sequence-specific manner, the expression of these host genes is induced. However, plants have evolved specific strategies to counter the action of TAL effectors and confer resistance. One mechanism is to avoid the binding of TAL effectors by mutations of their DNA binding sites, resulting in resistance by loss-of-susceptibility. This article reviews our current knowledge of the susceptibility hubs targeted by Xanthomonas TAL effectors, possible evolutionary scenarios for plants to combat the pathogen with loss-of-function alleles, and how this knowledge can be used overall to develop new pathogen-informed breeding strategies and improve crop resistance.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  Frontiers in Plant Science

• Publication date

  2015-07-14

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3389/fpls.2015.00535PMID 26236326PMCID 4500901
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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