Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

One of the major factors contributing to loss of crop yield and quality are diseases caused by microbial pathogens such as fungi, bacteria and viruses. Every year, farmers around the world spend billions of dollars on pesticides to save their crops, even though most chemicals are environmentally unfriendly and may generate pesticide-resistant pathogens. More and more attempts are being made to look for alternative control methods that are more sustainable and environmentally safe. One strategy is to utilize the defense mechanisms plants naturally use to fight against pathogens. To accomplish this, scientists all over the globe are teaming up to study the underlying general defense mechanisms (so called innate immunity) of plants, although much is left to be revealed. The goal of my research program is to understand the innate immunity of plants against a broad-spectrum of pathogens. During the past few years, our group has made extensive progress in determining the essential roles of nucleocytoplasmic trafficking, protein modification and RNA processing in plant innate immunity. We have discovered a number of regulators critical for plants to confer resistance to pathogens. Future efforts will be made to further dissect these novel resistance pathways and elucidate how all components work together to fight against pathogen attack. The proposed research will not only enrich our knowledge on how plants defend themselves against pests, but it will also provide hints about how to design novel strategies to protect the crops in our fields. Finally, mammalian innate immunity has been shown to share remarkable similarity to plant disease resistance mechanisms. Some regulators we discovered that are essential for plant innate immunity have close homologs in mammals whose functions are unknown. Our proposed studies to reveal the biochemical functions of these proteins will shed light on how these proteins function in animals. Thus our proposed research may also have potential health benefits to human society.