Investigating the role of the Sln1 turgor sensor kinase in the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae

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Rice blast is a devastating disease which affects rice cultivation all over the world. Blast is caused by a fungus called Magnaporthe oryzae and this project aims to investigate mechanisms required by the fungus to infect rice plants. The rice blast fungus produces a specialised infection structure called an appressorium, which is a dome-shaped cell that can generate enormous pressure of up to 8MPa (or 40 times the pressure of a car tyre). This pressure is applied as physical force at the leaf surface to puncture the plant cuticle. This remarkable infection process enables the fungus to cause disease.We aim to investigate how the enormous pressure generated inside the appressorium is translated into physical force at the base of the infection cell. We have identified a sensor protein called Sln1, which is necessary for the infection cell to regulate turgor pressure. Without this protein, the appressorium continues to expand under pressure, but cannot generate physical force and break its way into a rice leaf. In this project we will investigate how Sln1 functions in the rice blast fungus. We will investigate how Sln1 is activated during appressorium development. We will identify proteins that physically interact with Sln1 and may therefore contribute to its function, and we will study the proteins that are likely to be activated, or repressed in function by the activity of Sln1. In this way, we aim to define the turgor-sensing network that is regulated by Sln1 and understand how the appressorium functions. This research may lead to the development of new and novel disease control strategies that are focused on preventing fungal pathogens, like the blast fungus, from being able to gain entry to plant tissue.