description
- The world's most serious diseases of plants are caused by fungi. These diseases affect many of the crops we depend on for food, such as wheat, rice, barley, potatoes, and important fruits and vegetables. To control crop diseases, farmers currently plant new crop varieties which have been selectively bred to be disease-resistant, or spray their crops with modern systemic fungicides. Neither of these control measures are completely effective, however. Disease-resistant crop varieties are normally overcome by disease within 2-3 growing seasons, and fungicides are expensive, can be environmentally damaging, and fungi tend to develop resistance to new chemicals very quickly. Because of these problems, we need to think of new ways to control plant diseases. These new disease-control measures will have to be environmentally safe, economically viable and above all, highly effective. To develop new disease-control strategies for curing plant diseases, we first need to understand the biology of the fungal agents that cause plant diseases. This project is concerned with understanding the biology of rice blast disease, which destroys enough rice every year to feed 60 million people. The aim of research n my laboratory is to understand this disease and the fungus that causes it and to develop control strategies to fight the disease. The thread-like cells formed by the fungus that causes rice blast are very effective at colonising plant tissues and can do so without the plant immune system being immediately activated. When fungal pathogens invade living plant tissue, we believe that they secrete proteins that help them to evade the plant's defences, alter plant cell signalling, and subvert plant metabolism. Identifying these fungal proteins, and understanding the process of fungal secretion during rice blast disease, are important aims of this project. If we can understand the fungal secretory process and how it functions during plant infection and induction of the plant's defence reactions, then this will provide a means of potentially controlling the spread of the disease