Cross-Tolerance and Autoimmunity as Missing Links in Abiotic and Biotic Stress Responses in Plants: A Perspective toward Secondary Metabolic Engineering.

Plants employ a diversified array of defense activities when they encounter stress. Continuous activation of defense pathways that were induced by mutation or altered expression of disease resistance genes and mRNA surveillance mechanisms develop abnormal phenotypes. These plants show continuous defense genes' expression, reduced growth, and also manifest tissue damage by apoptosis. These macroscopic abrasions appear even in the absence of the pathogen and can be attributed to a condition known as autoimmunity. The question is whether it is possible to develop an autoimmune mutant that does not fetch yield and growth penalty and provides enhanced protection against various biotic and abiotic stresses via secondary metabolic pathways' engineering. This review is a discussion about the common stress-fighting mechanisms, how the concept of cross-tolerance instigates propitious or protective autoimmunity, and how it can be achieved by engineering secondary metabolic pathways.

Draft Genome Sequence of the Oomycete Globisporangium splendens Strain rgcb-1.

Globisporangium splendens (formerly Pythium splendens) is an oomycete pathogen of many economically important vegetable crops. Here, we present the first draft genome of P. splendens, which comprises 197 scaffolds with a total length of 53.3 Mb and 17,350 predicted protein-coding genes.

PKSIIIexplorer: TSVM approach for predicting Type III polyketide synthase proteins.

UNLABELLED: PKSIIIexplorer, a web server based on 'transductive Support Vector Machine' allows fast and reliable prediction of Type III polyketide synthase proteins. It provides a simple unique platform to identify the probability of a particular sequence, being a type III polyketide synthases or not with moderately high accuracy. We hope that our method could serve as a useful program for the type III polyketide researchers. The tool is available at "http://type3pks.in/tsvm/pks3". ABBREVIATIONS: PKS - Polyketide synthase, CHS - Chalcone synthase, SVM - Support vector machine, MCC - Matthews Correlation Coefficient.