Paper accepted: “’Slipped sandwich’ model for chitin and chitosan perception in Arabidopsis”

Today, Ekaterina Gubaeva’s and her co-authors’ paper on molecular perception of partially acetylated chitosans in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana was accepted for publication in “Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions”, one of the two most highly ranked journals in plant pathology. Initiated during a short research stay in Prof. Naoto Shibuya’s lab in Japan, Ekaterina had systematically investigated the abilities of well-characterized chitosan polymers and oligomers to induce disease resistance reactions in Arabidopsis seedlings, including of a mutant which lacks the receptor required for chitin perception. She found not only that the chitin receptor is clearly responsible for chitosan perception in this plant, but close inspection of her results also allowed her to draw conclusions concerning the mode of action of the chitin receptor, challenging current hypotheses. Together with physico-chemist Dr. Airat Gubaev and bioinformatician Dr. Ratna Singh, she then developed a new model for this interaction, and together with Rebecca Melcher and Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr, she produced specific chitosan oligomers to critically test her new model against the current models. This ended up being a very convincing story, and we are looking forward to see how it is received by the “chitin receptor community” which currently discusses such models controversially.