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Genes have been identified that confer resistance to multiple leaf rust species in barley. The findings by an international team, led by KAUST researchers, could transform the breeding of durable disease-resistant cereal crops and help support efforts to improve global food security.

“Disease is the exception and resistance is the rule—most microbes do not make us or cereal plants sick,” says Simon Krattinger from KAUST's Center for Desert Agriculture. “This is called nonhost resistance—resistance of an entire species against all strains of a pathogen. However, nonhost resistance in cereals is poorly understood.”

The cereal-rust relationship is ideal for studying nonhost resistance because all cereals belong to the grass family, but each cereal crop species is infected by only one specific rust (for example, wheat leaf rust only infects wheat). There are molecular factors in barley that prevent wheat leaf rust from establishing colonies; thus, pinpointing the genes responsible for generating this molecular barrier to infection would be invaluable for breeders.

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Image: Leaf rust infects wheat plants, considerably reducing crop yield.
2019 KAUST

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​Plant scientists are striving to cultivate crops that can cope with saline soils in the hope that this may help feed the world’s growing population, particularly in the face of climate change. Now, KAUST researchers have applied a newly developed robust statistical technique to examine how different barley plant traits affect yields grown in saline and nonsaline conditions.

“The problem with traditional regression analyses is that they focus on finding the average, or mean, of a given distribution,” says Gaurav Agarwal, who worked on the project under the guidance of his supervisor Ying Sun and in collaboration with plant scientists Stephanie Saade and Mark Tester.

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Image: Barley crops in a field trial.
© 2019 KAUST

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Twenty years ago, Salim Al-Babili was working with an international team to genetically engineer golden rice: a variety of rice that synthesizes the vitamin A precursor, beta-carotene, and that can help combat potentially lethal vitamin A deficiency. Since arriving at KAUST in 2013, Al-Babili has turned his molecular genetics expertise to save staple cereal crops in sub-Saharan Africa from the parasitic clutches of witchweed.

Purple witchweed, scientifically known as Striga hermonthica, is an invasive parasitic plant that undermines cereal crops in sub-Saharan Africa, with annual losses exceeding US$7 billion. The weeds endanger the livelihoods and food supplies of an estimated 300 million people.

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Image: Striga weeds survive by siphoning off water and nutrients from the host crop for their own growth.
© 2019 Vinicius M. Lube

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​A new actor in the immune system of plants has been identified. KAUST scientists have identified the protein MAP4K4 is needed to mount proper defenses against environmental pathogens.

The discovery helps explain the tight control of immune signaling in plants and reveals targets in a molecular pathway that could be manipulated by crop breeders. “Our findings are directly applicable to make plants more resistant to pathogens,” says study author, Heribert Hirt, professor of plant science at KAUST’s Center for Desert Agriculture.

MAP4K4 (short for mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase kinase kinase 4) is a well-established player in human immunity and inflammation, but its role in plant disease resistance was unknown. Hirt and his collaborators stumbled on it during a large screen for proteins involved in signal transduction in the weedy thale cress Arabidopsis. By studying mutant plants that lack a working copy of MAP4K4, Hirt’s team then drilled down into the core functions of this protein.

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Image: Heribert Hirt (left) and Yunhe Jiang check their plants for signs of disease.
© 2019 KAUST

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​A survey of the shark skin microbiome provides the first step toward understanding the remarkable resilience of shark wounds to infection.

In the wild, blacktip reef sharks are often seen bearing wounds, but they rarely exhibit obvious signs of infection around the wounds. As a first step toward understanding this phenomenon, an international team led by researchers at KAUST’s Red Sea Research Center investigated the microbial community living on the skin of sharks.

The team collected skin mucus samples from the backs and gills of wild-caught blacktip reef sharks around the Seychelles Islands. Next, they sequenced the 16S rRNA gene from these samples in order to identify the bacteria. Finally, they compared the bacterial communities from different samples to detect changes in response to injury.

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Image: Blacktip reef sharks in the wild are often seen bearing wounds, but they rarely exhibit obvious signs of infection around the wounds. This led researchers to investigate the microbial community living on the skin of sharks.
© 2019 Claudia Pogoreutz

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​A nuclear protein bound to RNA molecules affects chromatin structure and gene expression.

The finding adds to the understanding of a gene silencing pathway called RNA interference (RNAi). The discovery of this pathway in the late 1990s resulted in the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine being awarded to American scientists, Craig Mello and Andrew Fire.

Argonaute proteins (AGO) that are bound to RNA are known to have a role in RNA interference inside the cytoplasm. But, despite their known presence in the nucleus, the AGO’s role there is not clear.

Now, environmental epigeneticist, Valerio Orlando, together with his team at KAUST and colleagues in Italy and Japan, have uncovered the role of Argonaute proteins in the nucleus, using a combination of genome-wide approaches.

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Image: Valerio Orlando (left), Muhammad Shuaib (right) and colleagues used a combination of genome-wide approaches to uncover the role of Argonaute proteins in the nucleus.
© 2019 KAUST

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​In a world that seems to be drowning in plastic bottles, recycling this waste into useful materials would help to reduce its environmental impact. KAUST researchers have now invented a way to turn plastic bottles into porous membranes that could be used as molecular filters in the chemical industry.

Roughly 40 percent of the chemical industry’s energy used goes into separating and purifying chemicals in heat-intensive processes, such as distillation and crystallization. Using porous membranes to separate molecules from liquids could dramatically reduce that energy consumption. But most conventional membranes are not robust enough to withstand the sort of solvents used in industry, and alternative ceramic membranes tend to be very expensive.

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Image: Bruno Pulido tests the efficiency of the team's synthetic membrane.
© 2019 KAUST

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This project is the first time that the date palm genome has been studied so comprehensively. Dr. Ikram Blilou, Associate Professor of Plant Science at King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST) and her research team in Saudi Arabia have collected samples from date palms by the Quba mosque in Madinah, some of the most ancient date palms in the world.

"The date palm is one of the few fruit trees that, remarkably, can grow in the desert, a habitat with an arid climate where extreme temperature changes and drought conditions limit plant growth.

"Within KAUST's Center for Desert Agriculture Research we are studying date palms using advanced genome sequencing techniques and have begun to develop new breeding strategies to help palms grow faster and healthier as well as making them more resistant to pathogens and pests like the red palm weevil," says Dr. Blilou.

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Image: Dr. Ikram Blilou, Professor of Plant Science at King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST) with members of her research team collect date palm samples from the historical farm Al Dabeta by the Quba mosque in Madinah, the oldest mosque in the world.

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​By using proteins that naturally bind and arrange DNA inside cells, a KAUST-led team has devised a plug-and-play strategy for building stable, custom-designed nanostructures.

The versatile yet straightforward method for designing hybrid DNA-protein assemblages now provides engineers with a nanoscale platform for solving problems in science. “The DNA-protein nanotechnology has potential applications in many fields, including medicine, biotechnology and analytical chemistry,” says KAUST’s Professor Satoshi Habuchi, who led the study.

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Image: This air-plasma (the violet-blue glow) facility was used to treat the sample grids used in electron microscopy.
© 2019 KAUST