News

Happy 2025!!! New year dinner at Somerville College. Looking back at an excellent 2024 and forward to an exciting 2025!

Visiting Tee! Tee (Nattapong Sanguankiattichai) with his glycosyrin molecule has shown me his own laboratory at Mahidol University in Bangkok.

Pierre's paper: Extracellular subtilases inactivate flagellin immunogenicity. See Nature Communications.

Renier receives the commemorative plaque for the 'Shitsan Pai Lecture' at the Department of Life Sciences and Medicine in Hefei, China. See here!

Dampening defences! Changlong discovered that the cold shock protein elicitor is inactivated by plant-sectreted apoplastic proteases. See Nature Plants!

Visiting the Great Wall with former team members Changlong Chen and Shijian Song, both now running their own research labs in China.

Bye Tee! Tee moved back to Bangkok to start his own research lab, after nearly 8 years in Oxford as PhD and postdoc. Success Tee!

Labretreat (with fossil hunt) in the Wood Advent Granary in Somerset. Fantastic new research ideas!

Catching up with former team members at PP2024 in Hohenheim, now all running their own research labs: Johana in Cologne, Daniella in Trondheim and Mariana in Halle!

Renier receives award for Highly Commended Research Supervisor at in the Interdisciplinary Bioscience DTP.

DeepMind sends film crew to document the use of AlphaFold to elucidate plant-pathogen interactions.

Protomap! An impressive proteomic dataset reveals extensive endogenous processing of plant proteins. This dataset reveales the migration and topology of >5,000 plant proteins in protein gels! Read more in New Phytologist!

Bioengineering proteases into coreceptors! Jiorgos Kourelis has identified residues in orthologs and paralogs of immune protease Rcr3 of tomato that can be bioengineered to turn them into co-receptors for the recognition of protease inhibitor Avr2 of Cladosporium fulvum. Read more in The Plant Cell!

Genome edited lines lacking protease SBT5.2 do no longer process antibody 2F5 in the apoplast but surprisingly, 2F5 (and other IgGs!) are not secreted when expressed by agroinfiltration... Read more of Konstantina's work in Plant Biotechn. J.!

Bye Y4 students! Maria, Xavier and Evan have done fantastic research in the lab and were great students to host and supervise.

Suicide probes for P450 label animal, fungal an plant P450s in microsomes and upon transient expression. Read more of Maria's work in Sci. Rep.

NEW BBSRC grant!! The BBSRC funds us to improve the transient expression of the Covid19 Spike proteins and other viral glycoproteins in plants to enable fast, safe, and sustainable vaccine production.

ePip1! Engineering to make immune protease Pip1 insensitive for inhibition by EpiC2B from late blight increases immunity against this disease. Read more in Plant Biotech. J.!

YES global competition award for the innovative production of saponins in moss as sustainable detergents. Congrats Joy, Emma and Konstantina! (and Laura Bailey!)

Happy 2024! New year dinner at Somerville College. Looking back at a good 2023 and forward to an exciting 2024!

Bye Pierre! Pierre has been a great team member for many years and has been instrumental to our research on the plant immunity side of the lab. He will initiate his own lab at Bristol University. Thanks for everything, Pierre!

GST photoaffinity labeling! Maria validated a photoaffinity probe for GSTs and studied the GST response to agrochemicals and disease. More here!

NEW BBSRC grant! The BBSRC funds us to continue the validation of novel AI-predicted P68B inhibitors!

Labretreat to Swaffham, Norfolk. We had excellent brainstorms and have seen lots of seals during the hike!

AlphaFold Multimer predicts cross-kingdom interactions at the plant-pathogen interface. Excellent teamwork by Felix and Jie!

Dr. Issy! Issy submitted her thesis and passed her viva with only minor corrections. Matthieu Joosten was one of the examiners. Congrats, Issy!

Dr. Alice! Alice submitted her DPhil thesis and passed her viva with only minor corrections. Gail Preston and Tolga Buzkurt were her examiners. Well done Alice!!!

Bye Shijian! Only with us for 12 months, Shijian has been very productive on the molecular pharming project and returned to China to start a company!

Bye Y4 students! Sam, Ieuan, Alice and Edan were with use to do their Y4 projects with Shijian, Konstantina, Jie and Tee, respectively. They had a great time and made very interesting discoveries!

Issy's CORE paper! Depletion of CORE, the receptor of the cold shock protein of Agrobacterium results in increased transient protein expression!

Suppressed hydrolases! Daniela and Alice published their manuscript in New Phytologist reporting dozens of secreted hydrolases that are suppressed during infection, and showing that one of them, PR3, is a neo-functionalized hydrolase that contributes to immunity.

Bye Mariana! It has been very productive and fun having you with us for 4 years! Success starting your own laboratory at IPB in Halle!!!

Happy 2023! New year dinner at Somerville College. Looking back at a good 2022 and forward to an exciting 2023!

Dr. Laura! Laura has defended her D. Phil. thesis about the extracellular host manipulation by late blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans. Congrats!!!

Dr Felix! Felix has completed his D. Phil. with an outstanding thesis about the comparison between immuno-secretomes of various plant species and using Alphafold to predict novel interactions at the plant-pathogen interface.

Konstantina wins best presentation award at the Plant Molecular Farming (ISPMF2022) meeting in Rome!

Out in iScience: Activity-based probes trap early intermediates during metacaspase activation!

Lab retreat near Glastonbury! Huge house for a big brainstorm, good food and fun games!

Just out in New Phytoplogist: Broad-range metalloprotease profiling in plants uncovers immunity provided by defence-related metalloenzyme!

Happy 2022!  New year dinner at Somerville college. Looking back to a successful 2021 and forward to an exciting 2022. Cheers!

Maria has submitted her D. Phil. thesis on activity-based labeling of cytochrome P450s and glutathione transferases and successfully defended her work at the D. Phil. viva. Congrants Maria!!!

AgroLux: a luminescent strain of Agrobacterium tumefaciens to monitor Molecular Pharming and Plant Immunity in agroinfiltrated leaves.

A 4-day labretreat to Somerset. A lot of scientific creativity, good hikes and good gaming!

Tee has submitted his D. Phil. thesis and successfully defended his work on the biosynthesis and identify of the BGAL1 inhibitor during the D. Phil. viva. Congrats, Tee!!!

Defeated by the nines: nine extracellular strategies to avoid MAMP recognition in plants. An impressive review on how plant pathogens avoid recognition in the plant apoplast, published in The Plant Cell. Read here more about the first author Pierre Buscaill.

ERC Advanced grant! We will soon be spending 2,5 million euro to explore the plant-pathogen interface with chemical proteomics! Postdoc positions will be advertised soon!

Special Issue on Plant Proteases with an impressive review by Alice Godson with a meta-analysis of secreted immune proteases in plants!

Agromonas: a quick, versatile infection assay of Pseudomonas syringae on agroinfiltrated Nicotiana benthamiana leaves, facilitating studies of immunity conferred by both depletion and overexpression.

Emma has submitted her D. Phil. thesis and successfully defended this during her viva. After the has made the minor corrections we can call her Dr. Emma! Congrats!!!

Evolution of a guarded decoy published in Nature Communications. An impressive piece of research, spear-headed by Jiorgos Kourelis.

First proteolytic cascade in plants: Subtilase P69B of tomato activates immune protease Rcr3. Wonderful protein biochemistry uncovered by Judith Paulus! See more in PNAS.

A new BBSRC grant with Gail Preston to identify the BGAL1 inhibitor produced by Pseudomonas syringae! Exciting years ahead!

Our Science manuscript is online! An exciting discovery on the extracellular arms-race at the plant-bacterium interface.

We celebrate the acceptance of Pierre's manuscript! A great discovery made through a great collaboration involving many labmembers. Will be online soon.

Happy 2019! New year dinner at Somerville college. Looking back to a successful 2018 and forward to an exciting 2019. Cheers!

Best poster prize for Shivani Malik! Truly exceptional, out of 1300 posters!

Lab retreat in Wales! With fantastic weather for a long hike, fun games, and an excellent scientific brainstorm.

TWO best poster awards for Emma and Kyoko at the 4th conference on Plant Proteases and PCD in Ghent! Well done both!!!

A second BBSRC grant! This time on the role of substrates of immune protease Pip1 in the infections by Phytophthora infestans.

New BBSRC grant to study the role of extracellular glycosidases in immunity!

New probes to monitor active alpha-glycosidases in plants, applied to study anthesis and infection of saffron crocus.

We hosted the 11th International Conference on Activity-based Protein Profiling (ABPP2018) in Somerville College, Oxford: 104 participants, 30 presentations and 35 posters.

Plant Biotechn. J.: Three new protease inhibitors that boost recombinant protein expression upon agroinfiltration.

The fruits of 25 years of R gene cloning: 314 R genes group into 9 common overarching mechanisms. Well done, Jiorgos!

Niben secrets unlocked: Friederike Grosse-Holz published her extensive datasets on the transcriptome, extracellular proteome and active secretome of agroinfiltrated Nicotiana benthamiana in Plant Biotechn. J.

Highly Cited Researcher 2017! Declared by Clarivate Analytics (web of science). There are only 15 UK researchers in the field of Plant & Animal Science awarded with this title.

Top personal records at Oxford half marathon! Maria (2:01:23), Judith (1:57:49), and Friederike (1:52:06). Well done, athletes!

Best seminar award!

Jiorgos Kourelis gave the best PhD seminar the Oxford Congress of Plant Sciences!

Full Professor in Plant Sciences!

Renier van der hoorn has been awarded the title of Full Professor in the most recent Recognition of Distinction Exercise at the University of Oxford.

New EU Grant: 'Newcotiana'

A new EU grant has been awarded to the Plant Chemetics lab as part of a larget Horizon 2020-funded collaborative grant coined 'Newcotiana' on improving Nicotiana species for Molecular Pharming.

This video describes the activities in The Plant Chemetics Lab. A special thanks to Dr. Amjad Husaini for putting this together!!!

Four new team members run the Teddy Hall Relais under the team name 'Running buffers'! Excellent time!

NEW: Subunit-selective proteasome probes. Activity profiling with these probes revealed uncoupling uf subunit activities dring Pseudomonas syrningae infection. For more infomration, See Misas-Villamil et al., Plant J. 2017 pubmed.

Declared a Highly Cited Researcher, according to Thomson Reuters! In the UK, there are only 16 researchers in the field of Plant & Animal Science rewarded with this title.

Three team members have run the Oxford half marathon and broke their personal records. Kyoko finished at at 1:50:43, Judith at 1:56:59 and Marcel at 2:03:29 (partly on one leg). Well done everyone!!!

'Springwalk' in the Valley of the White Horse. We had fantastic weather!!!

PtoDC3000 produces Cys protease inhibitor Cip1!

Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000 (PtoDC3000) produces an inhibitor targeting secreted Cys proteases of its host, tomato. We coined this chagasin-like inhibitor Cip1 and it evades recognition by the Rcr3/Cf-2 system, possibly by its low affinity for Rcr3.  This is the fourth unrelated pathogen-derived inhibitor targeting the same secreted Cys proteases of the host. Previously identified inhibitors were from a tomato-pathogenic fungus (Avr2), oomycete (EpiCs) and nematode (Vap1).

We organized a exciting Conference on Plant Proteases in Somerville College, on 10-12 April 2016.

These 86 participants represent >40 research groups and work on diverse topics in plant biology but face common challenges on unravelling the action and substrates of plant proteases.

John Fell Funding awarded to Plant Chemetics lab

The John Fell Fund has awarded 75k£ to establish quantitative hyper-reactive cysteine profiling in Oxford and apply this technology to investigate how the proteome of a bacterial plant pathogen responds to a host-generated oxidative burst.

In ACS Chemical Biology: cofactor suppresses active site labelling.

We uncovered a strong correlation between enzymatic activity and active site labelling for aldehyde dehydrogenases, with one remarkable exception: nicotinamide cofactors suppress active site labelling.

Announcement of International Conference on Plant Proteases

This 3-day conference will be held in the centre of Oxford, April 10-12 2016. For speakers, venues, registration and other information, please visit www.plantproteases2016.com.

'Springwalk' in Chiltern.

A beautiful hike in the autumn forests of the Chilterns to Nettlebed and back, 35mins from Oxford. Some trees were irresistible...

In Current Biology: Functional divergence of two secreted immune proteases of tomato. We show that Rcr3 and Pip1 are paralogous proteases that differ in their expression levels and exposed surface and diverged >36 mya. Pip1 is an important immune protease acting against unrelated apoplastic pathogens, while Rcr3 is a co-receptor for pathogen-derived inhibitors, playing a minor role in the absence of immune receptor Cf-2.

NEW: On-line probe target library. We have assembled all our published probes, experiments and probe targets in a searchable database. Click here to search for labeling conditions, probes or targets.

In Plant Physiology: NEW probes for Cys protease subfamilies!

We introduce new fluorescent probes for three subfamilies of Cys proteases: aleurains (ALPs), cathepsin B's (CTBs) and vacuolar processing enzymes (VPEs). These probes are widely applicable and display unexpected dynamics of Cys proteases during seed germination. See Lu et al., Plant Physiol. in press.

Fascination of Plants Day

Judith, Luisa and Bala entertained the public (and themselves) by infiltrating plants during the Fascination of Plants Day (May 18) at the Harcourt Arboretum.

Exciting new projects for university students!

For biology/chemistry students for periods of 3-9 months on a diverse range of topics and using a broad variety of techniques. Please see the flyer for more information and contact Renier van der Hoorn for more information.

COST Meeting Chemical Proteomics
12-14 April 2015, Oxford

We are organizing the COST Meeting on Chemical Proteomics under the title: 'Mining the Chemical Proteome: Target discovery using chemical probes and their application in medicine and biology'. We have scheduled 25 speakers, 35 poster presentations and have over 100 participants. For more information, please download the flyer or program.

GreenProtease project has started!

This ERC-funded project has started with the arrival of Dr. Luisa Madeira in October. Friederike Grosse-Holz and Dr. Daniela Sueldo will join the GreenProtease team in November and January, respectively. Together they will unravel the proteolytic machinery of Nicotiana benthamiana by protease depletion to improve recombinant (glyco)protein production and elucidate the roles and substrates of the plant proteases. Welcome and success!

In MCP: Broad-range glycosidase profiling

Activity-based probes for glucosidases also label the active sites of dozens of other glycosidases! We show that these probes are broadly applicable on various plants, sub-proteomes and living cells.

In New Phytologist: Hydrolases precede hypersensitive tissue collapse.

Activity-based protein profiling was used to describe the active hydrolase content of tomato seedlings undergoing hypersensitive cell death. Differential hydrolase activities precede tissue collapse and are also found in plants infected with the fungal pathogen Cladosporium fulvum.

In Science: Potato blight lineage adapted to new host proteases.

A collaboration with the laboratory of Sophien Kamoun (Sainsbury lab, Norwich, UK) resulted in the discovery of the molecular details of host adaptation of a Phytophthora infestans lineage that jumped onto a different host species about 1300 years ago. The protease content of this new host species is different, which forced the pathogen to adapt its protease inhibitors. A single amino acid residue exchange underpins host adaptation and is associated with a reduced ability to manipulate the proteases from the former host. Published in Science. Comments published in Science, The Scientist, and Oxford Media.

An ERC-CoG-2013 consolidator grant has been awarded to Dr. Renier van der Hoorn for his 'GreenProteases' proposal with the full title: 'The proteolytic machinery of the plant apoplast: from basic understanding to improved recombinant protein production. The EU wil sponsor this project with 2.038.196 euro for a period of 5 years.

In MCP: Monitoring the ATP binding proteome

Many protein activities are driven by ATP hydrolysis. We monitored ATP binding activities of the Arabidopsis proteome using Acyl-ATP probes that label conserved lysine residues in ATP binding pockets. We discovered that these probes label a diversity of protein kinases, including receptor-like kinases, MAP kinases, calcium-dependent kinases and PTI-like kinases.

In PLoS Pathogens: Pathogen enters wounds by inhibiting host proteasome

Pseudomonas syringae pv. syringae is an epiphyte that occasionally causes disease upon wounding by hail, frost, strong winds and sand storms. We discovered that these bacteria enter wound sites and colonize adjacent tissues by producing proteasome inhibitor Syringolin A (SylA). SylA diffuses from the primary infections site and blocks salicylic acid (SA) signalling in adjacent tissues, creating an SA-insensitive zone that is ready for colonization.

In Chem & Biol: Probing functional tyrosines

We discovered that besides serine proteases, probes based on serine protease inhibitor AEBSF also label many other proteins, often at tyrosine residues residing in active sites, indicating that these ‘reactivity probes’ highlight functional tyrosines in proteomes. Indeed, labeling of glutathione S-transferases (GSTs) occurs on a single tyrosine that is not conserved in the substrate binding site but nevertheless essential for GST function.

In Plant J: A new tool for studying vacuolar processing enzymes

Vacuolar processing enzymes (VPEs) are legumain-like cysteine proteases involved in programmed cell death and protein processing. We introduce a specific, activity-bases probe to detect VPE activities in living tissues of different plants and discovered that VPE activity is upregulated upon infection with an oomycete pathogen. Interestingly, oomycete infection benefits from VPEs, probably by supporting their biotrophic lifestyle.

In Chem & Biol: Tracing bacterial effector in action

Plant pathogenic bacteria manipulate their host by injecting effector proteins. One of these effectors is AvrPphB, a cysteine protease that cleaves host kinases involved in immunity. Inspired by the unique substrate cleavage specificity of AvrPphB, we designed an activity-based probe that targets this protease. We used this probe to demonstrate that the prodomain of AvrPphB is required for secretion and its removal required of activity in the host cell.