Using an Autoimmune Model to Dissect Plant Immunity

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Proposal Summary One major contributing factor to losses in both crop yield and quality is disease caused by microbial pathogens. Every year, farmers around the globe spend billions of dollars on pesticides to save their crops, even though most chemicals are damaging to the environment and may lead to the evolution of pesticide-resistant pathogens. As such, the search for alternative control methods that are more sustainable and environmentally safe is ongoing. One alternative approach is to breed for crops with a variety of resistance (R) genes, which encode R proteins that trigger strong defense responses upon pathogen recognition. Despite R protein-mediated resistance being very effective against many pathogens, its molecular mechanism remains unclear. The long-term goal of my lab is to understand R protein-mediated plant immunity at the molecular level and use the knowledge to develop methods for sustainable crop protection. During the past decade, my group has discovered a number of critical regulators that function in the plant immune system. We showed that nucleocytoplasmic trafficking, transcriptional regulation, protein modifications and RNA processing all play important roles in the regulation of R protein-mediated immunity. Moving forward, we will use multidisciplinary approaches in molecular genetics, biochemistry, chemistry, and genomics to identify key missing players, both positive and negative regulators, in plant immunity and elucidate how these components function together to mount proper defense responses upon pathogen attack. The proposed research will not only enrich our current understanding of how plants defend themselves against microbial pathogens, but also provide insight into how to design novel strategies to protect the crops in our fields. Finally, mammalian innate immunity has been shown to share remarkable similarity to plant disease resistance mechanisms. Some regulators of plant immunity we are currently studying have close homologs in mammals whose functions are unclear. Our proposed studies to reveal the biochemical functions of these proteins will shed light on how these proteins function in animals. Thus our proposed research may also have potential health benefits to human society.