An extracellular network of Arabidopsis leucine-rich repeat receptor kinases

The cells of multicellular organisms receive extracellular signals using surface receptors. The extracellular domains (ECDs) of cell surface receptors function as interaction platforms, and as regulatory modules of receptor activation(1,2). Understanding how interactions between ECDs produce signal-competent receptor complexes is challenging because of their low biochemical tractability(3,4). In plants, the discovery of ECD interactions is complicated by the massive expansion of receptor families, which creates tremendous potential for changeover in receptor interactions(5). The largest of these families in Arabidopsis thaliana consists of 225 evolutionarily related leucine-rich repeat receptor kinases (LRR-RKs)(5), which function in the sensing of microorganisms, cell expansion, stomata development and stem-cell maintenance(6-9). Although the principles that govern LRR-RK signalling activation are emerging(1,10), the systems-level organization of this family of proteins is unknown. Here, to address this, we investigated 40,000 potential ECD interactions using a sensitized high-throughput interaction assay(3), and produced an LRR-based cell surface interaction network (CSILRR) that consists of 567 interactions. To demonstrate the power of CSILRR for detecting biologically relevant interactions, we predicted and validated the functions of uncharacterized LRR-RKs in plant growth and immunity. In addition, we show that CSILRR operates as a unified regulatory network in which the LRR-RKs most crucial for its overall structure are required to prevent the aberrant signalling of receptors that are several network-steps away. Thus, plants have evolved LRR-RK networks to process extracellular signals into carefully balanced responses.