Using an Autoimmune Model to Dissect Plant Immunity

造成作物产量和质量损失的一个主要因素是微生物病原体引起的疾病。每年，地球仪的农民都要花费数十亿美元购买杀虫剂来拯救他们的作物，尽管大多数化学品都在破坏环境，并可能导致抗药性病原体的进化。因此，正在寻找更可持续和环境安全的替代控制方法。另一种方法是培育具有多种抗性（R）基因的作物，这些基因编码的R蛋白在病原体识别时引发强烈的防御反应。尽管R蛋白介导的抗性对许多病原体非常有效，但其分子机制仍不清楚。我实验室的长期目标是在分子水平上了解R蛋白介导的植物免疫，并利用这些知识开发可持续作物保护的方法。 在过去的十年中，我的团队已经发现了许多在植物免疫系统中起作用的关键调节因子。我们发现，核质运输，转录调控，蛋白质修饰和RNA加工都在R蛋白介导的免疫调节中发挥重要作用。展望未来，我们将使用分子遗传学，生物化学，化学和基因组学的多学科方法来确定植物免疫中缺失的关键参与者，积极和消极的调节因子，并阐明这些成分如何共同作用，以在病原体攻击时产生适当的防御反应。这项拟议中的研究不仅将丰富我们目前对植物如何防御微生物病原体的理解，还将为如何设计新的策略来保护我们田间的作物提供见解。 最后，哺乳动物的先天免疫已被证明与植物抗病机制有着显著的相似性。我们目前正在研究的一些植物免疫调节剂在哺乳动物中有密切的同源物，其功能尚不清楚。我们提出的揭示这些蛋白质的生化功能的研究将揭示这些蛋白质在动物中的功能。因此，我们提出的研究也可能对人类社会有潜在的健康益处。

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.