Chemical Interception of Quorum Sensing at the Plant-Bacteria Interface

美国国家科学基金会生命过程化学项目用这个奖项来支持威斯康辛大学麦迪逊分校海伦·e·布莱克威尔教授的研究。Blackwell教授试图探究真核生物在宿主-细菌界面拦截细菌通讯途径的机制。细菌使用一种小分子的化学语言来评估当地的种群密度，这一过程被称为“群体感应”（QS）。植物相关细菌使用QS来调节对其植物宿主有害和有益的关键过程。现在很明显，许多植物宿主反过来“倾听”这些细菌信号，并可以用自己的化学信号做出反应，影响细菌的发病机制和共生关系。细菌和植物对小分子语言的依赖使有机化学家处于一个独特的位置，可以揭示这种通信网络的基本原理，并设计新的工具来在分子水平上调节它。Blackwell和她的团队提出：(1)识别能够在植物-细菌界面拦截细菌QS的非原生小分子，(2)描述植物感知和响应原生和非原生QS信号的机制，以及(3)表征植物用来拦截细菌QS的原生小分子信号。这项研究项目的更广泛影响可能是广泛的。Blackwell教授的发现应该适用于植物以外的寄主生物，并可能阐明QS在寄主真核生物中发生的机制。因此，CLP项目认为该项目具有高风险/高回报的要素，可以在QS和社会微生物学等不断发展的领域中询问前沿问题。参与该项目的学生将接触到包括有机合成、细菌学、蛋白质生物化学、分子生物学、植物科学和生物分析化学在内的多学科研究。期望在化学-生物界面提供一个良好的训练环境。

With this award, the NSF Chemistry of Life Processes program is supporting the research of Professor Helen E. Blackwell at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Blackwell seeks to interrogate the mechanisms by which eukaryotes intercept bacterial communication pathways at the host-bacteria interface. Bacteria use a chemical language of small molecules to assess local population densities in a process known as "quorum sensing" (QS). Plant-associated bacteria use QS to regulate critical processes both harmful and beneficial to their plant host. It is now evident that many plant hosts, in turn, "listen" to these bacterial signals and can respond with their own chemical signals that influence bacterial pathogenesis and symbiosis. The reliance of both bacteria and plants on a language of small molecules places organic chemists in a unique position to uncover the fundamental principles underlying this communication network and design new tools to modulate it at the molecular level. Blackwell and her team propose to (1) identify non-native small molecules capable of intercepting bacterial QS at the plant-bacteria interface, (2) delineate the mechanisms by which plants sense and respond to native and non-native QS signals, and (3) characterize the native small molecule signals used by plants to intercept bacterial QS. The Broader Impacts of this research project are potentially wide-ranging. Prof. Blackwell's discoveries should be applicable to host organisms beyond plants, and will likely shed light upon the mechanisms by which QS occurs in host eukaryotes, in general. As such, the CLP program sees this project as having elements of high risk/high reward in interrogating front-line questions in the growing fields of QS and sociomicrobiology. Students involved in this project will be exposed to multidisciplinary research involving organic synthesis, bacteriology, protein biochemistry, molecular biology, plant science and bio-analytical chemistry. This is expected to provide an excellent training environment at the chemistry-biology interface.