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

这个项目的目的是了解水稻是如何感染一种非常严重的稻瘟病的。稻瘟病每年摧毁高达30%的水稻收成，是对粮食安全的严重和反复的威胁。我们已经发现，引起稻瘟病的真菌经历了一种程序性细胞死亡的形式，这是它导致水稻叶片感染所必需的。这个项目旨在帮助我们了解为什么真菌会经历这种类型的孢子程序性自杀，以便使其特殊的感染结构能够正确发挥作用。该项目意义重大，因为迫切需要新的稻瘟病防治策略。杀菌剂价格昂贵，对它们的抗药性可能会发展得非常快。更持久的控制方法，无论是基于化学干预还是抗性育种，都需要了解导致这种毁灭性疾病的真菌制剂的生物学知识。由于稻瘟病具有重要的经济和社会意义，国际社会正在对其进行研究。正因为如此，这种真菌的基因组已经被测序，并开发了许多工具来从遗传学上研究这种真菌。这为更多地了解植物疾病的基础生物学提供了一个重要的机会，但这一疾病具有国际意义。稻瘟菌也与许多在英国广泛种植的作物(如小麦和大麦)上的致病真菌相似，其感染策略与白粉病和锈病非常相似。因此，从该项目中获得的知识也可能使英国农业受益。

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.