The activity of the dual-specificity receptor kinase, brassinosteroid insensitive 1 (BRI1), reflects the balance between phosphorylationdependent activation and several potential mechanisms for deactivation of the receptor. In the present report, we elucidate a unique mechanism for deactivation that involves autophosphorylation of serine-891 in the ATP-binding domain. Serine-891 was identified previously as a potential site of autophosphorylation by mass spectrometry, and sequence-specific antibodies and mutagenesis studies now unambiguously establish phosphorylation of this residue. In vivo, phosphorylation of serine-891 increased slowly with time following application of brassinolide (BL) to Arabidopsis seedlings, whereas phosphorylation of threonine residues increased rapidly and then remained constant. Transgenic plants expressing the BRI1(S891A)-Flag-directed mutant have increased hypocotyl and petiole lengths, relative to wild-type BRI1-Flag (both in the bri1-5 background), and accumulate higher levels of the unphosphorylated form of the BES1 transcription factor in response to exogenous BL. In contrast, plants expressing the phosphomimetic S891D-directed mutant are severely dwarfed and do not accumulate unphosphorylated BES1 in response to BL. Collectively, these results suggest that autophosphorylation of serine-891 is one of the deactivation mechanisms that inhibit BRI1 activity and BR signaling in vivo. Many arginine-aspartate (RD)-type leucine-rich repeat receptor-like kinases have a phosphorylatable residue within the ATP-binding domain, suggesting that this mechanism may play a broad role in receptor kinase deactivation.T he receptor-like kinase (RLK) family in Arabidopsis contains more than 600 members, of which more than 400 are structurally and functionally similar to animal receptor kinases but are evolutionarily distinct (1). Animal receptor kinases are predominantly tyrosine kinases, whereas plant receptor kinases are generally classified as Ser/Thr kinases, although recent work suggests that some plant receptor kinases are dual-specificity kinases that can also autophosphorylate on tyrosine residues (2-5). One of the best-studied plant receptor kinases is BRASSINOSTEROID INSENSITIVE 1 (BRI1), which functions with its coreceptor, BRI1-ASSOCIATED RECEPTOR KINASE 1 (BAK1), in brassinosteroid (BR) signaling (6-11). Current thinking is that BRI1 and BAK1 are in their unphosphorylated forms and inactive in the absence of BR, whereas in the presence of the BR ligand, BRI1 and BAK1 heterodimerize and become activated via auto-and transphosphorylation (12). The BRI1 KINASE INHIBITOR 1 (BKI1) and the BR-signaling kinase 1 (BSK1) may be two of the immediate downstream components that are first phosphorylated by BRI1 (13,14). BSK then activates the BRI1 SUPPRESSOR 1 (BSU1) phosphatase (15), which in turn inhibits the glycogen synthase 3-like protein kinase, BRASSINOSTEROID INSENSITIVE 2 (BIN2), by dephosphorylation of an essential phosphotyrosine residue (16). The net result is that the transcription fac...