Abstract
The detection of pathogen based on the perception of microbe/pathogen-associated molecular patterns (MAMPs/PAMPs) plays important role on basal resistance in plants. Chitin oligosaccharides, one of the MAMPs elicitor, induces defense response in Arabidopsis and rice. By the reverse genetics we identified a novel receptor kinase CERK1 that is essential for chitin signaling 1).
To find a novel component of chitin elicitor signaling, we screened the activation tagged T-DNA insertional mutants for those suppressed for chitin response, resulting in the finding of a novel mutant that lost chitin elicitor responsiveness. In the following generations of the mutant, however, even increased response to the chitin elicitor was observed. This phenomenon suggested a possibility of the overexpression of a negative regulator for defense responses in the original mutant and following silencing. We are evaluating the validity of such a hypothesis and also trying to identify the corresponding gene. 1)Miya et al., PNAS,104, 19613, 2007
