Thaís Dal’Sasso
@thaisdalsasso.bsky.social
Computational and systems biology 👩🏻💻, adaptive evolution 🧬, plant-microbe interactions 🪴 | Postdoc @envgenlab.bsky.social
NOD-like receptor genes undergo diversity-enhancing evolution in a fungal species complex academic.oup.com/gbe/advance-...
NOD-like receptor genes undergo diversity-enhancing evolution in a fungal species complex
Abstract. Fungi harbor diverse arrays of genes encoding NOD-like receptors (NLRs), key intracellular immune proteins found in plants, animals, and bacteria
academic.oup.com
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Programmable design of synthetic plant immune receptors for pathogen protein recognition
The limited diversity and recognition scope of natural plant immune receptors impede resistance breeding against rapidly evolving pathogens. Here we report programmable design of synthetic plant immun...
science.org
COMPARATIVE GENOMIC ANALYSIS OF CORE AND ACCESSORY GENES IN RUST FUNGI REVEALS PATHOGENICITY-ASSOCIATED GENE FAMILIES IN Phakopsora pachyrhizi https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.03.736376v1
Gene regulatory networks to decipher tomato multi-pathogen interactions Multari et al. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
🌱🧬Pathogens manipulate the apoplast by controlling pH, water & nutrients. Plants fight back with oxidative bursts, toxins & hydrolases. Adapted pathogens disarm these defenses & hide from detection Molecular arms race outside the cell @annualreviews.bsky.social www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
Extracellular Antagonists: Offense and Counter-Defense in the Apoplast
Extracellular interactions are pivotal in the plant–pathogen arms race. Fungal, bacterial, and oomycete pathogens manipulate the apoplast to control pH, water soaking, sugar levels, and nutrient avail...
annualreviews.org
Molecular mimicry of a pathogen virulence target by a plant immune receptor | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Molecular mimicry of a pathogen virulence target by a plant immune receptor
Plants and animals respond to pathogen attack by mounting innate immune responses that require intracellular nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) proteins. These immune receptors detect pathog...
science.org
Everything you wanted to know about the protein chemistry behind how amino-acid changes affect the cellular abundance of proteins from @tkschulze.bsky.social Effects of residue substitutions on the cellular abundance of proteins doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
Many pathogens that infect wild plants are close relatives of crop pathogens. Important model systems for studying plant diseases. Check out the special issue on wild plant pathosystems published in the Philosophical Transactions B: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...
Volume 381 Issue 1951 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B | The Royal Society
Influential themed journal issues across the life sciences.
royalsocietypublishing.org
Congratulations to Prof. Eva Stukenbrock on her appointment to the Leopoldina. Her research on fungal pathogens helps us better understand evolution and protect crops. www.evolbio.mpg.de/3882989/eva-... #EvolutionaryBiology #Leopoldina
So diverse and yet conserved. Check out opinion paper by Leonhard Pachinger @leopach.bsky.social on antimicrobial effectors produced by fungal pathogens: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Antimicrobial effectors of plant-associated fungi: multipurpose proteins with fast-evolving surfaces and structurally conserved cores
Plants are exposed to a variety of devastating pathogens, causing significant yearly yield losses. In order to facilitate infections, plant pathogens …
sciencedirect.com
Screen 1M random protein sequences to discover that biology-like folds are accessible from random sequences with surprising frequency www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Thrilled to see this finally out!! Our new work suggests #Starships helped #Colletotrichum acquire the genes needed to infect lupin. A glimpse into how fungal pathogens emerge through horizontal transfer and genome reshaping. biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #Fungi #Genomics #Pathogenicity #evolution
📢 EffectorGeneP is finally here! Stop missing small, single-exon or orphan genes from your favourite pathogen genome. Current tools only annotate 15%-78% of effector genes, EffectorGeneP finds 95% - including the large AvrSr26 family in stem rust. #Bioinformatics 📖 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Robbins, Liu & Kelly present RECUR, a method for identifying recurrent amino acid substitutions from multiple sequence alignments that is fast, easy to use, and scalable to thousands of sequences. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag036 #evobio #molbio #compbio
RECUR: identifying recurrent amino acid substitutions from multiple sequence alignments
Abstract. Identifying recurrent changes in biological sequences is important to multiple aspects of biological research—from understanding the molecular ba
doi.org
@thaisdalsasso.bsky.social is applying new tools to address the evolution and functional diversification of secreted proteins of fungal plant pathogen. Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Happy to have contributed to this! We investigated the #evolution of a virulence-associated gene family across Dothideomycetes, revealing duplication and loss events, including lineage-specific expansions in a crop pathogen. 🧬 #FungalGenomics 👉 DOI: doi.org/10.1007/s002...
Evolutionary History and Diversification of M35 Metalloproteases in Dothideomycetes: A Phylogenomic Overview and Case Study in Corynespora cassiicola - Current Microbiology
Deuterolysin metalloproteases (M35s), a family of zinc-dependent proteolytic enzymes, function as key virulence factors in bacteria and fungi. In plant-pathogenic fungi, these proteins induce host cel...
doi.org
Congrats @marco-guerreiro.bsky.social. @estukenbrock.bsky.social and colleagues on this exciting study linking codon optimization and adaptive translation to lifestyle transitions in a group of fungi.
Nature Communications@natcomms.nature.com · 7mo agoEmerging fungal pathogens have detrimental impacts on crops, animals, and humans. This study demonstrates that the fungal transition from saprotroph to opportunistic human pathogen is likely facilitated by adaptive translation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The scikit-bio paper in online in Nature Methods! Many thanks to our collaborators, community contributors and reviewers! We couldn’t have done it without you. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #Bioinformatics #OpenSource
Scikit-bio: a fundamental Python library for biological omic data analysis - Nature Methods
Nature Methods - Scikit-bio: a fundamental Python library for biological omic data analysis
nature.com
Wishing you all happy holidays. 🎄🎁 Greetings from the Environmental Genomics Group. 🇲🇽🇫🇷🇧🇷🇵🇹🇵🇪🇷🇸🇮🇷🇩🇰🇩🇪🤗
🎉 Our new paper is out! We assembled a telomere-to-telomere genome 🧬 of Sporisorium scitamineum and showed how two smut strains with contrasting virulence deploy distinct early-infection programs on resistant and susceptible sugarcane genotypes. DOI: doi.org/10.1186/s128...
Had a great time organizing & teaching the MadFungi transcriptomics workshop. We spent three amazing days on RNA-seq for plant–microbe interactions and had great conversations with brilliant MSc/PhD students! 🌱🍄 #RNAseq #PlantMicrobeInteractions #Bioinformatics #PlantPathology
Environmental Genomics Lab@envgenlab.bsky.social · 11mo agoWe’re excited to host the first MadFungi Research Unit workshop in Kiel, welcoming MSc and PhD students from across Germany! Over three days, this workshop will cover many aspects of RNA-seq analysis in plants 🌱 and fungi🍄🟫.
Important read if you use LLMs for science knowledge discovery around plants "What Large Language Models Know About Plant Molecular Biology" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... As per usual LLMs appear to propagate biases.
What Large Language Models Know About Plant Molecular Biology
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly permeating scientific research, yet their capabilities in plant molecular biology remain largely uncharacterized. Here, we present MoBiPlant, the first compreh...
biorxiv.org
Really happy this is out in preprint - Congratulations to @graemekettles.bsky.social @zymohaider.bsky.social, and everyone involved for their hard work completing this study! It examines a Z. tritici effector that is a molecular mimic of plant LRRs, and suppresses PTI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Molecular mimicry of plant cell-surface immune receptors by fungal secreted leucine-rich repeat proteins
Leucine-rich repeat (LRR) receptor-like kinases (LRR-RLKs) are important plant immunity proteins. The wheat pathogen Zymoseptoria tritici produces many virulence effectors during infection; however, m...
biorxiv.org
Dolly (@dollymehta.bsky.social) developed a pipeline to screen for conserved #RNA structures across genomes. She then applied it ~14,000 #plastid genomes and identified nearly 60 conserved structures. doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Genome-wide identification of conserved RNA structure in plastids
The systematic discovery of functional RNA structure directly from sequence remains a central challenge in genomics. Plastid genomes, with their deep evolutionary history and extensive data availabili...
doi.org
Great talk this afternoon by Joy Bergelson at #ESEB2025! 🌱 She showed how a small number of NLRs in Arabidopsis can recognize P. syringae, and how a protein interaction model can help explain ETI responses.
📣 Happy to see the journal publication 📄 of our work on Starships 🚀 in Verticillium fungi: terrific work led by @yukiyosato.bsky.social rdcu.be/exBSp
Starship giant transposons dominate plastic genomic regions in a fungal plant pathogen and drive virulence evolution
Nature Communications - Giant transposons, known as ‘Starships’, mediate horizontal gene transfer between fungal genomes. Here, Sato et al. show that Starships occupy genome regions...
rdcu.be
In #GENETICS, @3rdreviewer.bsky.social and @smishra677.bsky.social show it is possible to estimate recombination solely using the allele frequency spectrum and provide a genealogical interpretation of the results, showing how #MachineLearning can provide insights into biology. buff.ly/emixz9W
#2025ISMPMI 📣 In silico screening of PRR-epitope interactions is now possible! Here, we developed mamp-ml to predict their immunogenic outcomes without structural context. Let's accelerate engineering plant receptors for robust resistance! 🚀🌱 Small 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
mamp-ml: A deep learning approach to epitope immunogenicity in plants
Eukaryotes detect biomolecules through surface-localized receptors, key signaling components. A subset of receptors survey for pathogens, induce immunity, and restrict pathogen growth. Comparative gen...
biorxiv.org
New online! A genomic perspective on fungal diversity and evolution
A genomic perspective on fungal diversity and evolution
Nature Reviews Microbiology, Published online: 30 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41579-025-01195-6In this Review, Mondo and Grigoriev explore the central role of omics approaches to investigate the biology and evolution of fungi and understand phylogeny and how traits evolved over time within the fungal kingdom.
nature.com
