Probing the Arabidopsis proteome with putative biotrophic pathogen effectors to discover new innate immunity components.

利用病原体来提高我们对植物防御的理解。 植物经常受到病原体（真菌、细菌、病毒）的侵袭。其中一些病原体是活体营养型的;这些病原体依赖于它们的宿主生存。在这种复杂的生活方式中，病原体必须抑制植物的免疫系统（以防止植物发起防御反应），同时它从植物中取食而不杀死植物。为了实现其目标，病原体依赖于转移到宿主中的效应物，目的是抑制宿主免疫力并劫持宿主细胞来取食。利用全测序的农作物病原体基因组，我们可以有一定的信心预测这些毒力因子（效应因子）的身份。我们的短期目标是使用模式植物拟南芥来评估这些预测的效应子是否可以干扰植物细胞功能，或者它们是否可以被识别（使植物具有抗性）。最终的目标有三个方面：1）发现由给定病原体部署的新的功能效应器，2）使用这些预测的效应器来探测A。3）发现植物识别的效应子，并最终将拟南芥中与抗性相关的遗传成分转移到作物中，使其对病原菌产生抗性。第三个目标将代表作物改良策略的重大突破，证明拟南芥（或最终任何物种）可以用作其他物种的抗性基因库。

Using pathogens to improve our understanding of plant defence. Plants are constantly attacked by pathogens (fungi, bacteria, virus). Some of these pathogens are biotrophic; those are pathogens that depend on their host survival. In this intricate lifestyle the pathogen must suppress the plant immune system (to prevent the plant from launching a defence response) while it feeds from the plant without killing it. To achieve its goal the pathogen relies on effectors that are transferred into the host with the aim of suppressing the host immunity and hijack the host cells to feed. Using the genome of fully sequenced pathogen of crop plants we can predict with some confidence the identity of these virulence factors (effectors). Our short term goal is to use the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana to assess whether these predicted effectors can interfere with the plant cellular functions or if they can actually be recognized (to make the plant resistant). Ultimately the objectives are three-fold: 1) discover new functional effectors deployed by a given pathogen, 2) to use these predicted effectors to probe the A. thaliana immune system to discover new components involved in defense and 3) to discover effectors that are recognized by the plant, and eventually transfer the genetic component involved in resistance in Arabidopsis towards to crop plant to irender them resistant to the pathogen. The third objective would represent a significant breakthrough in crop improvement strategy in demonstrating that Arabidopsis (or eventually any species) can be used as a reservoir of resistance gene for other species.