Biology subjects

Duclos, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Duclos, A..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

"Out of sight, out of mind". The antagonistic role of the transcriptional memory associated with repeated acoustic stimuli on the priming of plant defense.

BackgroundPriming plant immunity offers a powerful and sustainable strategy for crop protection, enabling plants to respond faster and more efficiently to threats. This increased readiness is driven by transcriptional memory--molecular mechanisms that store and recall stress responses, including protein accumulation, transcription factor activity, and epigenetic modifications. However, the interplay among transcriptional stress memory, its stability, and its broader impact on plant resistance remain poorly understood. ResultsHere, we reveal a tight link between transcriptional memory and defense priming in Arabidopsis thaliana exposed to repeated acoustic stimulations. Using a combination of experiments and computational modeling, we show that enhanced resistance to Sclerotinia sclerotiorum after three stimulations arises from three key mechanisms: (1) preemptive activation of defense pathways in noninoculated plants, (2) increased diversification of defense-related genes, and (3) gene priming. This heightened defense state is sustained by transcriptional stress memory across thousands of genes, which is likely orchestrated by transcription factor cascades. Challenging the conventional view that priming involves stepwise activation of distinct pathways, our findings suggest that priming instead results from the simultaneous modulation of a broad spectrum of defense pathways. This built-in redundancy enhances resilience, shielding primed plants from the genetic variability-driven resistance loss observed in naive plants. However, this same redundancy imposes strict limits on further enhancing the resistance. More frequent acoustic stimulations did not amplify the protective effect, and transcriptional memory faded within 1.5 days after stimulation ceased. ConclusionsBy integrating experimental and computational approaches, we present a genome-scale quantitative model of stress-induced gene regulation. Our results highlight the trade-offs inherent in transcriptional memory-driven priming, revealing both its potential and its limitations in optimizing plant immunity.

plant biology↗

bioRxiv2021

Pathogen-derived mechanical cues regulate the spatio-temporal implementation of plant defense

How immune responses are activated and regulated is a central question in immunology. In addition to molecular signaling, recent work has shown that physical forces regulate the immune response of vertebrates by modifying transmembrane protein conformation and cell contact. Mechanical stress and strain produced by forces constitute physical cues perceived by cells instructing gene expression. Whether mechanical cues generated by pathogens during host colonization can trigger adaptive responses in plant cells remains elusive. We found that local and progressive variations of plant cell wall tension caused by fungal pathogen attacks are transmitted to neighboring healthy tissue around the infection site and trigger immunity in distal cells. This thigmoimmunity process requires the reorganization of cortical microtubules and contributes strongly to Arabidopsis disease resistance. One-Sentence SummaryActivation of plants immunity depends on fluctuations of mechanical tension caused by a fungal pathogen.

plant biology↗

bioRxiv2020

Newfound coding potential of transcripts unveils missing members of human protein communities

Recent proteogenomic approaches have led to the discovery that regions of the transcriptome previously annotated as non-coding regions (i.e. UTRs, open reading frames overlapping annotated coding sequences in a different reading frame, and non-coding RNAs) frequently encode proteins (termed alternative proteins). This suggests that previously identified protein-protein interaction networks are partially incomplete since alternative proteins are not present in conventional protein databases. Here we used the proteogenomic resource OpenProt and a combined spectrum- and peptide-centric analysis for the re-analysis of a high throughput human network proteomics dataset thereby revealing the presence of 280 alternative proteins in the network. We found 19 genes encoding both an annotated (reference) and an alternative protein interacting with each other. Of the 136 alternative proteins encoded by pseudogenes, 38 are direct interactors of reference proteins encoded by their respective parental gene. Finally, we experimentally validate several interactions involving alternative proteins. These data improve the blueprints of the human protein-protein interaction network and suggest functional roles for hundreds of alternative proteins.

systems biology↗