Alexander Ciattoni

Investigating Plant Immune Proteases for Enhanced Pathogen Resistance: advertisement for the RISE-DAAD position at daad.de/rise/en/rise-germany/find-an-internship Start of the internship: between May 15 and July 15, 2026 Duration: Up to 3 months Funding: monthly scholarship of 992 € + health insurance, accident and personal liability insurance Deadline: The application must be submitted by November 30, 2025

Undergrads from Canada, Ireland, UK, & US: Don't miss the DAAD-RISE #plantscience funded internship at @ipbhalle.bsky.social with @snp2prot.bsky.social. Apply by Nov 30th: daad.de/rise/en/rise-germany/find-an-internship 🌱

06.11.2025 09:42 — 👍 9    🔁 8    💬 0    📌 1

Shedding light on receptor kinase processing

Thrilled to share our latest review on receptor kinase processing in plants! 🌱

Huge congratulations to @adithya1972.bsky.social and Anna for leading this work, and a big thank you to our fantastic collaborator Martina-Ried Lasi for making this a truly rewarding team effort!

04.11.2025 08:25 — 👍 28    🔁 14    💬 0    📌 0

Periodic PSA: "western" should be lowercase in western blot – unlike the "Southern" blot, which was named for a person, the western blot was named for a laugh

26.10.2025 14:38 — 👍 4    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0

A screenshot showing cartoon drawings of scientist. All are wearing white lab coats. most are men, any with white or crazy hair. Most wear glasses. Four out of 24 are clearly women, the rest appear to be men. 23 out of 24 look white, and one is sort of blue seems to be not entirely human.

A few years ago I made a slide showing the top 10 results if you search Google Image for "cartoon scientist".
In my slide, 10/10 are white men.
Someone asked if this is still true, so I tried again.
Here below you have 24 images.
20 are men, 4 are women (progress!).
23 are white, 1 is blue 🤔

16.10.2025 11:45 — 👍 25    🔁 9    💬 3    📌 0

Rewriting the code of plant immunity go.nature.com/475WgV7

14.10.2025 20:25 — 👍 27    🔁 12    💬 0    📌 1

A secreted citrus protease cleaves an outer membrane protein of the Huanglongbing pathogen Plants secrete a variety of proteases as a defense response during infection by microbial pathogens. However, the relationship between their catalytic activities and antimicrobial functions remains la...

1/13 Thankfully, both you and your plants have a lot of sophisticated ways to fight off invading pathogens.
In our new preprint, we describe a new way in which animals and plants share a common strategy to ward off harmful bacteria.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

10.10.2025 14:15 — 👍 34    🔁 24    💬 3    📌 1

Have you ever wondered why pumpkins are never purple or blue like other plants? 🎃🌈

While most plants can produce pink, blue, and purple pigments (thanks to anthocyanins), the Cucurbitaceae family 🍈 🍉 🥒have lost all the pathway genes to produce these pigments.
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

10.10.2025 11:35 — 👍 52    🔁 21    💬 6    📌 1

Fig. 1.Four classes of roles of immune proteases illustrated via examples. (i) Pathogen perception: Required for Cladosporium Resistance-3 (Rcr3) protease is inhibited by the fungal avirulence effector Avr2. The Rcr3-Avr2 complex is recognized by the immune receptor Cf-2, triggering a defence response (Kruger et al, 2002). (ii) Regulation of the immune response: METACASPASE 4 (MC4) is activated by calcium upon wounding or pathogen attack. MC4 cleaves tonoplast-located ProPEP1 releasing PEP1 to the apoplast where it is perceived by PEP RECEPTORS (PEPRs) thereby initiating defence responses (Hander et al, 2019). (iii) Counteracting pathogen effectors: soybean aspartic protease GmAP5, degrades the Phytophthora sojae virulence factor glycoside hydrolase family 12 (GH12) protein, XEG1 (Xia et al., 2020). (iv) Direct pathogen attack: secreted aspartic proteases (SAPs) cleave Pseudomonas syringae MucD protein thereby suppressing bacterial growth (Wang et al., 2019).

💡 SPECIAL ISSUE VIEWPOINT 💡

Immune proteases are promising targets for protein engineering 🛠️ to boost disease resistance in plants 🌾 - Schuster et al.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

#PlantScience 🧪 @marischuster.bsky.social @aciattoni.bsky.social

06.10.2025 10:32 — 👍 17    🔁 13    💬 1    📌 0

My flatmate asked if I’ve ever made a GMO. This sparked a discussion making me realize how challenging science communication is and how scientists often lack training in it. I’m catching up with a podcast by @orlandodl.bsky.social that explains GMOs to a broader audience... while working with GMOs😅

23.09.2025 18:59 — 👍 3    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 0

Hot off the heels of our what is a preprint video is our what is preprint peer review video!

Featuring @prelights.bsky.social @prereview.bsky.social @reviewcommons.org, @elife.bsky.social & @peercommunityin.bsky.social

#peerreview #preprint #scipub

14.09.2025 19:24 — 👍 6    🔁 6    💬 1    📌 0

Reflections on joining Bluesky: Opportunities and risks for the scientific community Over the past two weeks, I have taken a closer look at Bluesky, exploring its features and dynamics through the lens of my own experience within the neuroscience community. So far, my impressions have...

I love the Bluesky community, but I regret Mastodon didn't become the path scientists followed, as it was the logical choice. We didn't learn from Twitter's mistakes and Bluesky risks becoming Twitter 2.0 in a few years. @fabmusacchio.bsky.social nicely summarised my concerns here: s.42l.fr/lJRVqxGY

27.08.2025 20:23 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Seeing the Invisible: Learning to Teach with Biomolecular Visualization – Simple Book Publishing Seeing the Invisible: Learning to Teach with Biomolecular Visualization – Simple Book Publishing

I’m so proud to be a part of this OER that aims to lower the barrier for professors to incorporate molecular modeling & visualization into their courses (i.e. teaching students to interact w/3D models of proteins & other macromolecular structures &/or making custom figures)! doi.org/10.15781/m4z...

27.08.2025 01:34 — 👍 2    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 0

The floral inoculating protocol: a simplified Arabidopsis thaliana transformation method modified from floral dipping The floral dip protocol mediated by Agrobacterium tumefaciens is the most widely used transformation method for Arabidopsis thaliana. The “floral dip” …

I can highly recommend the flowering inoculation protocol (doi.org/fmcxgb) as alternative to the dipping method. The easy version of it is: spin a 2mL o/n Agro culture and resuspend in 2mL 5%Sucrose + 0.02%Silwet L-77. Pipette ~5µL per bud cluster. For highest transformation rates repeat after 1week

05.08.2025 21:10 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

shortDOI Service

If presenters would use shortdoi.org this issue would be solved

22.07.2025 08:49 — 👍 4    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Stop citing journal names in your presentations - but PMIDs are too long (I will never get all of those numbers in the correct order!)
Check out this awesome tool that takes your DOI from 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002882 to pw75.
Much more accessible and easy for the audience!

22.07.2025 07:24 — 👍 3    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0

I really hope to see this change! Yet I would recommend to use the shortdoi service ( www.shortdoi.org ) to generate a shorter ID, compared to PMID. It allows IDs for anything that has a DOI, ie preprints included

21.07.2025 16:30 — 👍 7    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 1

Plant Science Student Conference 2025, June 30 – July 2

Plant Science Student Conference 2025, June 30 – July 2

Plant Science Student Conference 2025, June 30 – July 2

Plant Science Student Conference 2025, June 30 – July 2

Students at @leibnizipk.bsky.social have organised a well-crafted conference #PSSC-2025 in the previous few days. SNP2Prot members were able to join in this event and meet the Leibniz plant community🍀

@leibniz-gemeinschaft.de @unihalle.bsky.social @ipbhalle.bsky.social @unileipzig.bsky.social

02.07.2025 14:29 — 👍 8    🔁 4    💬 0    📌 0

@aciattoni.bsky.social representing the #ReceptorBiochemistry group @ipbhalle.bsky.social at #PSSC2025.
Enjoy!

30.06.2025 12:45 — 👍 5    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0

Really happy to be at the 20th Plant Science Student Conference #PSSC2025 @leibnizipk.bsky.social
I am looking forward to exciting talks and discussions in the next few days.

30.06.2025 12:38 — 👍 8    🔁 4    💬 0    📌 1

Hacking the immune system: plant immune protease engineering for crop protection Immune proteases are promising targets for protein engineering to boost disease resistance in plants.

I am happy to share our viewpoint on immune protease engineering!

academic.oup.com/jxb/advance-...

26.05.2025 08:43 — 👍 15    🔁 6    💬 0    📌 1

Illustration featuring green/orange dots and dashes, with the heading: "Ideas and Speculation. A new article section for your next publication".

Our authors can freely speculate the meaning and implications of their data in our new section:

💡 Ideas and Speculation 💡
buff.ly/0I8lpwz

11.05.2025 10:01 — 👍 17    🔁 5    💬 0    📌 0