Paper accepted: “The fluorescent protein sensor roGFP2-Orp1 monitors in vivo H2O2 and thiol redox integration and elucidates intracellular H2O2 dynamics during elicitor-induced oxidative burst in Arabidopsis”

Today, a manuscript from the Schwarzländer group in which Philipp Lemke is a co-author was accepted for publication, again in the excellent “New Phytologist”. Commensurate with the long title, this is a multi-author paper which has been long in the making, resulting from a multi-partner collaboration of Prof. Markus Schwarzländer, formerly at the University of Bonn, now at our institute. They had developed and validated this new intra- and subcellular sensor for hydrogen peroxide but were missing an appropriate case study for publication. That opportunity arose during this summer’s Advanced Module in Molecular Plant Pathology where the Master students first, guided by Philipp, measured the extracellular H₂O₂ produced during a chitosan-elicited oxidative burst in leaf discs in our group, then continued to characterize the response in Markus’ group using Arabidopsis lines expressing the new sensor. And it worked! Of course, it still took some more precise measurements and controls to produce publication quality data. For us, this collaboration opens up new doors. When I started as a professor in Münster more than twenty years ago, one of my dreams had been to develop techniques that would allow visualizing and quantifying enzyme activities in situ directly in the living tissue, to be able to dissect plant responses to pathogens more precisely in time and space. Our research developed in a different way, but genetically encoded sensors like the one Markus’s group has developed are now allowing just this kind of analyses. It truly is a dream come true.