Nature China’s “Recommendation of the month” award has been won by Timon Cheng-Yi Liu at the South China Normal University in Guangzhou. He has won a free subscription to Nature for recommending the paper: The phosphothreonine lyase activity of a bacterial type III effector family. Timon writes: “Pathogenic bacteria can inject into host cells virulence factors via the so-called type III machinery. Li et al. describe a family of bacterial virulence factors that have a previously unknown phosphothreonine lyase activity that can remove the phosphate from signaling mitogen-activated protein kinase family members involved in innate immunity. This family of effectors is important in the virulence of a variety of animal and plant bacterial pathogens, including Shigella, Salmonella, and Pseudomonas syringae”. You can add your comments about the paper here.

If you would like to recommend a paper reporting high-quality research in any scientific or medical discipline originating from mainland China and Hong Kong for inclusion in Nature China, you can do so here. Nature China aims to highlight the best research being produced in Hong Kong and mainland China. Every week, its editors survey the scientific literature to identify the best recently published papers from the region, and provide short summaries. The choices are sorted into categories to provide a useful study and research resource. Readers can rank and comment on the chosen papers. In the case of research published in Nature journals, access to the original article is provided.