SKIC2 and Autoimmunity: Liu et al. are concerned that autoimmunity cannot explain such phenotypic variability, as they write “... this theory [auto-immunity induced through DCL2 processing of dsRNA] is difficult to explain the various types and severities of growth defects of dcl4 as well as dcl4 xrn4 and dcl4 ski2.” We are puzzled by this comment, because in fact, many NLR-dependent Arabidopsis autoimmune mutants show phenotypic variability and pronounced dependence on growth conditions (Yu et al. 1998; Brodersen et al. 2002; Zhang et al. 2003; Palma et al. 2010; Lolle et al. 2017).