Prediction and Discovery of Host Metabolites and Metabolic Pathways Required for Proliferation of an Obligate Fungal Biotroph

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Powdery mildews are widespread fungal pathogens that cause major crop loss and susceptible crops are regularly treated to limit infection. Most people have observed the white powdery-like growth associated with powdery mildews in their gardens for example, on leaves of roses. Powdery mildews are obligate biotrophs, meaning they can only grow and reproduce on living plants. As such, they obtain all nutrients from the plant host. The goal of this project is to couple cutting edge approaches in molecular genetics and genomics, analytical chemistry, informatics and modeling to identify the specific plant metabolites required by the powdery mildew for its growth and reproduction. Broader impacts of this work include developing novel tools and resources for the study of powdery mildews and similar types of biotrophs for the research community, identifying novel targets to limit powdery mildew growth to enhance crop yield while limiting chemical treatments, and training and mentoring our next generation of scientists,including under-represented minority students, in cross-disciplinary science. The powdery mildew-host plant system is uniquely suited to the development of tools and approaches that can be applied more generally for the study of inter-organismal metabolism and development. This project will iteratively create a constraint-based powdery mildew-host plant integrated metabolic metabolic model to predict host and fungal metabolic pathways. This will be accomplished by: i) developing novel computational and experimental platforms, tools, and approaches, ii) identifying critical metabolites and pathways required by obligate fungal biotrophs for their development and proliferation, and iii) determining nutritional requirements to enable axenic culturing. The project also seeks to obtain fundamental insights into nutrient reservoir metabolism as local plant cells are used to fuel the sustained growth and reproduction of the fungus, as well as knowledge about control points and pathways targeted by pathogens. The broader impacts include advancing knowledge of the powdery mildew - plant host interaction, training our next generation of cross-disciplinary STEM scientists through mentoring of students and postdocs, development, testing, and use of integrated metabolic databases and prediction tools for the broader scientific community, and identifying novel targets to limit powdery mildew growth and reproduction.