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。植物不断地受到病原体(真菌、细菌、病毒)的攻击。其中一些病原体是生物营养型的；这些病原体依赖于它们的宿主生存。在这种错综复杂的生活方式中，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)，而不是在不杀死植物的情况下取食。为了实现其目标，病原体依赖于转移到宿主体内的效应器，目的是抑制宿主免疫并劫持宿主细胞进食。利用作物病原菌的全序列基因组，我们可以有把握地预测这些毒力因子(效应物)的特性。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器是否可以干扰植物的细胞功能，或者它们是否实际上可以被识别(使植物具有抗性)。最终的目标有三个：1)发现特定病原菌所部署的新的功能效应物；2)利用这些预测的效应物来探测拟南芥的免疫系统，以发现参与防御的新成分；3)发现被植物识别的效应物，并最终将拟南芥中参与抗性的遗传成分转移到作物上，以提高植物对病原菌的抗性。第三个目标将是作物改良战略的重大突破，表明拟南芥(或最终任何物种)可以用作其他物种的抗性基因储存库。

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.