A PAX6-regulated receptor tyrosine kinase pairs with a pseudokinase to activate immune defense upon oomycete recognition in Caenorhabditis elegans.

ABSTRACT: Oomycetes were recently discovered as natural pathogens of Caenorhabditis elegans, and pathogen recognition alone was shown to be sufficient to activate a protective transcriptional program characterized by the expression of multiple chitinase-like (chil) genes. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying oomycete recognition in animals remain fully unknown. We performed here a forward genetic screen to uncover regulators of chil gene induction and found several independent loss-of-function alleles of old-1 and flor-1, which encode receptor tyrosine kinases belonging to the C. elegans-specific KIN-16 family. We report that OLD-1 and FLOR-1 are both necessary for mounting the immune response and act in the epidermis. FLOR-1 is a pseudokinase

SUBMITTER: Drury F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10523662 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature