Systems Biology of the Plant Effector-Triggered Immunity Landscape

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Agricultural pest and pathogens reduce the yield of the six largest food crops by >40% annually. However, plant diseases are the exception rather than the rule. How do the majority of plants resist infection? How do successful pathogens overcome the defenses of plants to cause disease? The answers to these questions are largely resolved at the interface between pathogens and their hosts. Understanding this molecular dialog is not only important for protecting our food supply, but also provides an extraordinary system for studying fundamental questions related to pathogenesis and host immunity. My research group has made significant NSERC funded advances in characterizing the range of ways that a pathogen can manipulate a host plant in order to cause disease and how plants can detect these perturbations to activate immune responses. The current research proposal builds on our contributions to the plant-microbe interactions field. Our long-term objective is to protect crop plants from pathogens. To achieve this goal we propose three objectives: 1. Study immunodiversity within & between host species including both wild and domesticated plants. 2. Study interactions between pathogenic virulence proteins (effectors) to determine how effector networks influence host-pathogen outcomes. 3. Map the interface between pathogen virulence proteins and their host targets to understand the molecular dialog that dictates the outcome of host-pathogen interactions. This study will identify pathogen effectors and host resistance genes that govern the outcome of host-pathogen interactions, providing fundamental information on the mechanisms underlying the molecular interplay between crops and their pathogens, as well as develop new genetic resources for breeding resistant crops. We will provide insight into how the plant immune response has changed over the course of crop domestication, especially how this process has impacted the maintenance of immunodiversity in domesticated crops. These studies will better enable us to respond to the unrelenting challenge imposed by bacterial pathogens; a threat that will only increase as the consequences of global climate change become more immediate.