A new comprehensive annotation of leucine-rich repeat-containing receptors in rice.

Oryza sativa (rice) plays an essential food security role for more than half of the world's population. Obtaining crops with high levels of disease resistance is a major challenge for breeders, especially today, given the urgent need for agriculture to be more sustainable. Plant resistance genes are mainly encoded by three large leucine-rich repeat (LRR)-containing receptor (LRR-CR) families: the LRR-receptor-like kinase (LRR-RLK), LRR-receptor-like protein (LRR-RLP) and nucleotide-binding LRR receptor (NLR).

Aligning Protein-Coding Nucleotide Sequences with MACSE.

Most genomic and evolutionary comparative analyses rely on accurate multiple sequence alignments. With their underlying codon structure, protein-coding nucleotide sequences pose a specific challenge for multiple sequence alignment. Multiple Alignment of Coding Sequences (MACSE) is a multiple sequence alignment program that provided the first automatic solution for aligning protein-coding gene datasets containing both functional and nonfunctional sequences (pseudogenes).

Origin and Diversity of Plant Receptor-Like Kinases.

Because of their high level of diversity and complex evolutionary histories, most studies on plant receptor-like kinase subfamilies have focused on their kinase domains. With the large amount of genome sequence data available today, particularly on basal land plants and Charophyta, more attention should be paid to primary events that shaped the diversity of the RLK gene family. We thus focus on the motifs and domains found in association with kinase domains to illustrate their origin, organization, and evolutionary dynamics.

Glycosyltransferase Family 61 in Liliopsida (Monocot): The Story of a Gene Family Expansion.

Plant cell walls play a fundamental role in several plant traits and also influence crop use as livestock nutrition or biofuel production. The Glycosyltransferase family 61 (GT61) is involved in the synthesis of cell wall xylans. In grasses (Poaceae), a copy number expansion was reported for the GT61 family, and raised the question of the evolutionary history of this gene family in a broader taxonomic context.