Plant immunity

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Plant diseases caused by microbial pathogens are major threats to global crop production, causing an annual loss of 10-16% in yields and impacting food quality. As the human population sky-rockets and the impacts of climate change on agriculture are increasingly challenging, the need for sustainable agriculture has never been more important. A better understanding of how plants interact with microbial pathogens and turn on defense responses, and how pathogens survive in harsh environments and cause diseases in their host plants is critical for modern crop protection. This knowledge will help us design better strategies for controlling epidemics caused by crop pathogens and support sustainable agriculture in a major way.The proposed research will address two main questions: (1) How do plants activate immune responses upon pathogen recognition through immune receptors? (2) How does the notorious soilborne pathogen, Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, form its survival structure in soil and cause catastrophic diseases in diverse hosts? Better understanding of these questions will allow more effective control of persistent pathogens in crop fields. Multidisciplinary methods in molecular genetics, genomics, metabolomics, biochemistry and cell biology will be applied to dissect the signaling events in plant hosts and the pathogen. The proposed projects build on previous research success and preliminary results. They will lead to discoveries of new regulators of host defense and pathogen development and virulence. They will also reveal the mechanisms of how these regulators function biochemically during signal transduction. These mechanistic findings will identify novel molecular ways to improve host immunity, and specific targets for fungal pathogen control, thus providing more resources for crop protection. In addition, through interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary training, next-generation plant/fungal biologists will be educated with diverse skillsets. These trainees will be able to integrate modern biological research tools to help solve one of the most urgent problems of our time: feeding the increasing global population in a sustainable manner.