Loose stacks of journal articles swamp Bud Ryan’s desk, articles about “emerging parallels” between the immune systems of animals and the defense systems of plants. Research in the field has taken off in the past decade, spurred by Ryan’s discovery of the systemic wound response and the first signal peptide ever found in plants.

Ryan says similarities in plant and animal immunity suggest that the internal signaling strategies of animals and plants have a common origin.

“It’s clear that these derived from some primitive organism that predated plants and animals” and was a common ancestor of both, he says. “It’s very, very old.”

That plants and animals share some biochemical tools shouldn’t come as a big surprise. Features of living systems don’t appear out of nowhere, and structures and pathways that prove useful tend to be conserved and passed on—although not always in the same role. Sathyanarayanan Puthanveettil (’01 Ph.D.), who has worked with kinase enzymes involved in calcium signaling in plants and learning in animals, says it’s common for an existing protein to be co-opted for new uses in other species.

“The same things may be used by different organisms but in a different context, and they may be regulated differently,” he explains.

That’s well established in theory, but the obvious excitement in the articles on Ryan’s desk indicates that the scientists who wrote them were caught off guard a bit by the similarities they found. Maybe it’s just that researchers have so much to keep track of in their own field that it’s easy to develop a bit of tunnel vision—until something like Ryan’s discovery cracks open the tunnel.

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