Exploring communication mechanisms between fungal pathogens and plant cells

气候、环境、立法和社会的变化导致了新的作物病原体的出现和现有问题物种的进化。引起作物病害的植物病原菌每年造成全球农作物总产量的15%左右的损失，对全球粮食安全构成严重威胁。特别严重的是由谷物侵染镰刀菌真菌(www.scabusa.org)引起的镰刀菌赤霉病(www.scabusa.org)和小麦中的发酵菌侵染(Dean(2012)分子植物病理学13,414-430)，这两个疾病都将在本博士项目中研究。(B)探索特定胞间连丝相关小麦蛋白的功能作用(S)(Faulkner(2013)PNAS，110,9166-9170)。为了实现项目目标，学生将学习如何使用一系列现有的工具(真菌报告菌株、小麦、水稻和拟南芥转化体)、已建立的技术(RNA序列分析、光/紫外/共聚焦显微镜、病毒诱导基因沉默(VIGS)(Lee(2012)植物生理学160,582-590)和新兴技术(如基因组编辑)。他们还将接受使用定制软件的培训，以量化从他们的详细显微镜研究中获得的活体真菌-植物图像数据集并对其进行数学建模。

Climatic, environmental, legislative and societal changes led to the emergence of novel crop pathogens and the evolution of existing problematic species. Phytopathogenic species which cause crop plant diseases are annually responsible for the loss of ~15% of total crop yield globally and are therefore a serious threat to global food security. Particularly serious are Fusarium head blight (FHB)/head scab disease caused by cereal infecting Fusaria fungi (www.scabusa.org) and Zymoseptoria tritici infections in wheat crops (Dean (2012) Molecular Plant Pathology 13, 414-430), both will be studied in this PhD project.The main scientific aims of this project are (A) to investigate both the cellular and molecular mechanisms required for the transition of Fusarium graminearum hyphae from apoplastic to plasmodesmatal growth (Brown (2010), Fungal Biology 114, 555-571; Brown (2017) Mol Plant Pathol 18, 1295-1312) and (B) to explore the functional role(s) of specific plasmodesmata associated wheat proteins (Faulkner (2013) PNAS, 110, 9166-9170). To achieve the project aims the student will learn how to use a range of existing tools (fungal reporter strains, wheat, rice and Arabidopsis transformants), established techniques (RNA seq analyses, light/UV/confocal microscopy, Virus Induced Gene Silencing (VIGS) (Lee (2012) Plant Physiology 160, 582-590) and emerging technologies (such as genome editing). They will also be trained in the use of bespoke software to quantify and mathematically model the in vivo fungal-plant image datasets acquired from their detailed microscopy studies.