PALs: Emerging Key Players in Broad-Spectrum Disease Resistance

Phenylalanine ammonia lyases (PALs) are involved in resistance to plant pathogens, but the mechanism by which they contribute to plant immunity is unclear. Two recent studies provide direct evidence for PALs' contributions to rice broad-spectrum resistance (BSR) mediated by nucleotide-binding domain and leucine-rich repeat-containing (NLR) proteins and RNA-binding proteins (Zhai et al., Mol. Cell, 2019; Zhou et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A., 2018).