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Happy to share results of my last 3 years of work on the Thoeris defense system - an amazing connection between bacterial and plant immunity! https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.06.425286v1
The Thoeris system contains TIR domains - canonical domains of animal and plant immune systems. In Thoeris TIR is involved in bacterial immunity, but how?
Our first observation was that Thoeris causes bacteria to commit suicide upon infection, and prevents phages from completing their life cycle.
How does it kill? Thoeris causes NAD depletion upon infection, and that NADase activity is triggered by a small molecule produced by the TIR domain when it encounters a phage!
And here's the 
connection - plant TIRs also produce similar molecules when they detect pathogens! and TIR from plants can actually activate Thoeris NADase https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31439793/
connection - plant TIRs also produce similar molecules when they detect pathogens! and TIR from plants can actually activate Thoeris NADase https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31439793/
In plants and animals, TIR-containing proteins are the immune receptors that identify infection to trigger immune response. It is the same in Thoeris - different TIR proteins protect against different phages, and can be mixed-and-matched
So in the end, we can say that TIR domains are ancient immunological domains in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and they signal either by protein interactions (in animal TLRs) or by secondary messenger production (in plants and Thoeris)
Thanks to everyone involved - my twitterless co-authors, @SorekLab @AdiMillman @shany_doron @Nitzan_T and our collaborators in @MSOmics!
And special thanks to @AudeBer, whose friendship and advise got me through this project in one piece
