Investigating the role of autophagic cell death during plant infection by the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe grisea

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The aim of this project is to understand how rice plants become infected with a very serious disease called rice blast. Rice blast disease destroys up to 30% of the rice harvest each year and is a serious and recurrent threat to food security. We have discovered that the fungus that causes rice blast disease undergoes a form of programmed cell death that is necessary for it to bring about infection of a rice leaf. This project is designed to help us understand why a fungus undergoes this type of programmed suicide of its spores, in order to allow its specialised infection structures to function correctly. The project is significant because new control strategies are urgently required for rice blast disease. Fungicides are expensive and resistance to them can develop very rapidly. More durable control methods, either based on chemical intervention or resistance breeding, require a knowledge of the biology of the fungal agent responsible for this devastating disease. A large international community is studying rice blast because of its economic and social importance. Because of this, the genome of the fungus has been sequenced and many tools have been developed to study the fungus genetically. This provides a significant opportunity to learn more about fundamental biology of plant disease, but in a disease of international significance. The rice blast fungus is also similar to many of the fungi that cause disease on crops grown widely in the UK such as wheat and barley and its infection strategy is very similar to that of powdery mildews and rusts, for example. Knowledge gained from this project may therefore also benefit UK agriculture.