Avalilação PREreview de A plant immune receptor mediates tritrophic interactions by linking caterpillar detection to predator recruitment

Review of “A plant immune receptor mediates tritrophic interactions by linking caterpillar detection to predator recruitment”

In this paper by Palacios et al., the authors show that the absence of a functional Inceptin Receptor (INR), required for detection of inceptin by common bean, leads to a reduced emission of predatory wasp–attracting volatiles. The authors cleverly screen and make use of a naturally occurring INR mutant and convincingly outline that this mutation leads to a reduction in volatile production of certain compounds and correlates with reduced predation of sentinel caterpillars on bean plants. In RNA-seq experiments, the authors show that In11 peptide treatment on bean plants leads to the upregulation of genes associated with protein modification/phosphorylation and kinase activity, outlining a novel molecular-to-ecological link.

We enjoyed reviewing this paper, as it is clearly written and effectively communicates both the hypothesis and the results. The conclusions made are justified by the data. We only have some minor comments and suggestions to improve the manuscript, as well as some suggestions for future research directions.

-              We assume the authors are somewhat restricted by the word limit of the target journal guidelines, but we would have appreciated a bit more introduction on the class of HAMP-detecting receptors (significance of the island domain, etc.) as well as the impact of predator attraction. A broader discussion of the RNA-seq data would have also been nice.

-              Figure 1: It would be great if the authors could add/mention other possible polymorphisms they might have detected in INR after re-sequencing, as there are quite some differences in the ratios of ethylene production upon In11 treatment. Similarly, are there any differences in the chloroplast ATP synthase γ-subunit of these plants?

-              Line 95–98: The authors mention that “The resulting protein product is expected to be truncated at the last LRR before the island domain (Fig. 1f), indicating that attachment to the plasma membrane and ligand-induced interaction with co-receptors is impaired.” This should be toned down to “suggests,” as it is not tested by the authors.

-              The color coding for Figures 1C, 3A, and 3C is hard to distinguish.

-              Figure 2 / Extended Data Figure 2: It appears that Figure 2 and Extended Data Figure 2C are the same? Extended Data Figure 2C has no figure legend.

-              The legend for Extended Data Figure 2A states “NILs labelled as lines 3, 4, and 7 derived from three independent initial crosses are used in the work,” but the datapoints for panel C indicate NIL3, 4, and 8.

-              Figure 2: Could the way the p-values are reported in panels A and B be unified? Panel C is missing statistical analyses.

-              Figure 3F: The stacked bar chart makes it a bit hard to compare the NILs. Would a grouped bar chart be better to see differences between the lines for each treatment?

-              Figure 3E: The figure legend could be expanded to make the message of this panel clearer.

Future research directions:

The authors report that the enriched Gene Ontology (GO) categories among In11-upregulated genes mostly affect genes related to protein modification/phosphorylation and kinase activity. Would a phospho-proteomics approach make sense to investigate the required molecular components downstream of INR?

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.