The paper:
D. Chinchilla et al., "A flagellin-induced complex of the receptor FLS2 and BAK1 initiates plant defence," Nature, 448:497– 501, 2007. (Cited in 66 papers)
The finding:
A team of European researchers led by Thomas Boller of the University of Basel, Switzerland, challenged Arabidopsis thaliana plants with bacterial peptides, and found that mutants that lacked the gene for the co-receptor brassinosteroid insensitive 1 (BRI1)-associated receptor kinase 1 (BAK1) were more susceptible to infection. This suggested that BAK1, which was known to function in growth and development, also serves a critical role in helping plants sense and respond to infiltration by a broad range of microbes.
The impact:
The paper was "really fundamental" in revealing the molecular pathways that plant cells use to sense microbial molecules on their surfaces and mount intracellular signaling cascades, says Libo Shan, a Texas A&M University plant molecular biologist. "It opened up a lot of ...
