Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Using pathogens to improve our understanding of plant defence.Plants are constantly attacked by pathogens (fungi, bacteria, virus). Some of these pathogens are biotrophic; those are pathogens that depend on their host survival. In this intricate lifestyle the pathogen must suppress the plant immune system (to prevent the plant from launching a defence response) while it feeds from the plant without killing it. To achieve its goal the pathogen relies on effectors that are transferred into the host with the aim of suppressing the host immunity and hijack the host cells to feed. Using the genome of fully sequenced pathogen of crop plants we can predict with some confidence the identity of these virulence factors (effectors). Our short term goal is to use the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana to assess whether these predicted effectors can interfere with the plant cellular functions or if they can actually be recognized (to make the plant resistant). Ultimately the objectives are three-fold: 1) discover new functional effectors deployed by a given pathogen, 2) to use these predicted effectors to probe the A. thaliana immune system to discover new components involved in defense and 3) to discover effectors that are recognized by the plant, and eventually transfer the genetic component involved in resistance in Arabidopsis towards to crop plant to irender them resistant to the pathogen. The third objective would represent a significant breakthrough in crop improvement strategy in demonstrating that Arabidopsis (or eventually any species) can be used as a reservoir of resistance gene for other species.