The Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics invites you to a seminar given by Sergey Ivanov, Assistant Professor in Botany & Plant Pathology at OSU. Ivanov’s talk, “Control of the lipid provisioning program in plant–fungal symbiosis”, will be on Wednesday, Nov. 19 at 9 a.m. in ALS 4001.

Abstract: The mutualistic association between plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi requires intracellular accommodation of the fungal symbiont within a membrane compartment and maintenance by means of lipid provisioning. Symbiosis signaling through lysin motif (LysM) receptor-like kinases and a leucine-rich repeat receptor-like kinase DOES NOT MAKE INFECTIONS 2 (DMI2) activates transcriptional programs that underlie fungal passage through the epidermis and accommodation in plant root cortical cells. We showed that the cortical cell–specific, membrane-bound proteins of a CYCLIN-DEPENDENT KINASE-LIKE (CKL) family associate with, and are phosphorylation substrates of, DMI2 and a subset of the LysM receptor kinases. CKL1 and CKL2 are required for AM symbiosis and control expression of transcription factors that regulate part of the lipid provisioning program. In addition, using a yeast-2-hybrid RNA-sequencing screen and bimolecular fluorescence complementation assays we identified a set of general regulatory factor (14-3-3) proteins as putative interactors of CKL proteins and showed that this interaction occurs on the PAM of the Medicago cell. Currently, we hypothesize, that 14-3-3 proteins serve as a scaffold to either modulate the function of CKL2 or to ensure the interaction of CKL2 with the elements of downstream signal transduction.