Wen-Yuan Song
Education
Institute of Genetics, Academia Sinica, Beijing (China), 1995, Ph.D.
Dr. Song's lab is interested in the mechanisms by which the rice Xa21 gene confers resistance against the bacterial blight disease and the approaches to engineering broad spectrum and durable resistance in crops. Bacterial blight caused by Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae is one of the most devastating diseases of rice worldwide. Xa21 is the first resistance gene cloned from rice. It encodes a receptor-like kinase protein (XA21) with 23 leucine-rich repeats in the putative extracellular domain and a serine / threonine kinase in the putative intracellular domain (XA21K). XA21K is capable of autophosphorylating multiple serine and threonine residues, and interacting with a number of rice proteins in vitro. Currently, we are working on biological significance of the XA21K autophosphorylation and the XA21K binding proteins.