Barley (Hordeum vulgare) is the fourth most important arable crop worldwide and second in the UK. Diseases, including those caused by the brown rust pathogen Puccinia hordei, cause barley yield losses of up to 40%. Despite the large commitment to reduce pathogen-associated losses, these are still a major threat to agriculture in general and barley in particular. The difficulty lies in the dynamic nature of the interaction between plant and pathogen. In response to pathogen attack, plants initiate immune responses that are sufficient to fend off most pathogens. Adapted pathogens, however, produce effector proteins that are capable of suppressing the host immune response and promote successful infection, causing severe crop damage. In this interaction, ubiquitination acts as a central regulator of host immunity, and its versatility plays a key role in the successful activation of the defence response. Furthermore, some effectors have been shown to manipulate the host ubiquitination pathway by acting as ubiquitin ligases or trigger ubiquitin-dependent degradation of several host proteins in Arabidopsis. The barley pathogen, P. hordei utilises effector proteins for successful colonisation and establishment of disease. To date, reference genomes have been assembled for four different P. hordei strains, identifying 654 putative effector proteins. However, none of these has been validated yet.
The goal of this PhD is to design novel approaches to identify and characterize P. hordei effectors and study the mechanisms they employ to suppress key ubiquitin-regulated immune pathways and knockdown the barley immune response.
To do so, the PhD student will i) identify P. hordei effectors, ii) identify the barley targets of the identified effectors (and potential effector-recognising barley immune receptors), and iii) understand the effector-mediated exploitation of the host ubiquitin system by Puccinia.
In summary, this PhD will develop a novel strategy to identify pathogen effectors, delivering frontier knowledge on how pathogen effectors disrupt the ubiquitin regulated immune response, which could be used to optimize genetic improvement in crop breeding programs. The development of crops resistant to diseases has great potential for reducing our reliance on chemicals and sustainably increasing crop yields, addressing the United Nations Goal2: Zero Hunger programme.
We seek a student who is interested in applying novel molecular biology technologies to a real-world problem. The student will benefit from the combined mentorship of Dr Orosa (expert in plant molecular biology), Prof Spoel (expert in plant immunity and ubiquitin signaling) and Dr Havis and Dr Dussart (experts in crop-pathogen interactions).
https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/beatrizorosa
https://spoel.bio.ed.ac.uk/index.html
https://pure.sruc.ac.uk/en/persons/neil-havis
https://pure.sruc.ac.uk/en/persons/francois-dussart
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