Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Microbial diseases reduce yields and ruin crops, putting major constraints on agriculture that threaten food security. The ability of cells to sense and respond to pathogen infection while also maintaining growth and development is critical to plant health. Signal transduction is largely achieved by kinases that phosphorylate target proteins, altering their activity, localization, stability, and/or binding partners. Our research focuses on understanding how plant immune signaling cascades are established and controlled, with the ultimate goal of enhancing disease resistance in agricultural crops. We want to know how cells process information: How are signals perceived, transduced, and attenuated? How are signaling pathways organized and controlled? How is information integrated to optimize plant health? As the main executors of signaling pathways, we focus on how protein kinases work. In particular, this research proposal focuses on a family of kinases that sense and respond to changes in cellular calcium levels - a hallmark of stress. These `calcium-dependent protein kinases' (CPKs) are important signal transducers in plant immune pathways and are considered `signaling hubs' because they integrate multiple stress signals. Furthermore, as CPKs are capable of both sensing and responding to signals, they represent an ideal study system to learn more about how cells decode signals. The proposed work aims at understanding how CPKs function as signal transducers in plant stress pathways. We aim to uncover novel insights about how CPKs receive and decode messages and how those messages are transduced. We will characterize CPK substrate proteins, investigate how CPKs are activated and repressed with sub-cellular and molecular resolution, and engineer CPKs with novel specificities. While most of our genetics work is conducted in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, we use comparative biochemistry across kingdoms to enable broad and transferable impact. To induce immune signaling, we use established immunogenic elicitors and model pathogen systems as part of our toolkit. Our research program integrates genetics, molecular and cellular biology, physiology, biochemistry, and proteomics, providing a breadth of training opportunities for highly qualified personnel in state-of-the-art molecular biology and plant science. Our work is well-positioned to make novel discoveries about how plants defend against pathogens as well as how protein kinases achieve signaling specificity. We take an integrative and highly collaborative approach to research, expanding our reach far beyond the field of plant immunology and enabling unique training opportunities. Our research will furthermore enable structure-guided precision engineering of immune related kinases in the generation of disease resistant crops - an avenue our lab is already pioneering.