Researchers from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences (SGGW) in cooperation with scientists from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas in the USA and the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences have discovered and tested an unknown effector protein. They published the article about the achievement in the journal Cell.

It all started about 4 years ago, when Marcin Gradowski with Dr Krzysztof Pawłowski from the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology of the Institute of Biology, Warsaw University of Life Sciences searched for effector kinases among “Gammaproteobacteria”.

He then discovered the effector protein HopBF1 from “Pseudomonas syringae” (plant pathogen), which was slightly similar to known kinases. Dr Krzysztof Pawłowski, the tutor of M. Gradowski’s master’s thesis, showed the discovered protein to Dr Vincent Tagliabracci from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical. They with Prof. Jacek Henning from the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences developed a protein research project.