description
- Wheat yellow rust disease, caused by the fungus Puccinia striiformis f. sp tritici (PST), is an historical and continuing threat to wheat production worldwide. Wheat is a critical staple providing 20% of the calories consumed by humankind. However, PST is not only a serious threat to wheat but also to triticale, which is another economically important crop species. The project aims to identify commonalities and differences in the host proteins that are manipulated by this pathogen. The devastating impact of this disease gives a deep sense of urgency to improve our understanding of host processes manipulated by PST to improve the longevity of newly deployed resistant cultivars. Plants respond to pathogen invasion in various ways depending on the genetic background of both the plant and invading pathogen. During early invasion, plants perceive signatures of attack that activate basal immune responses. In response, pathogens deliver proteins called effectors to their hosts to suppress plant defense circuitry and enable parasitic infection. In certain resistant hosts, plant immune receptors may recognize some of these effector proteins and mount processes to restrict pathogen colonization. This activates a complex network of regulatory genes that coordinate the host immune response. However, for PST-infected plants the degree of host specificity in these responses is not known. Studying host-specific plant gene expression profiles provides the means to identify common and host-specific responses. The student will be strategically positioned within a multidisciplinary research group at The Genome Analysis Centre and John Innes Centre to provide unique training opportunities in next-generation sequence analysis, molecular biology, plant-pathology and wheat genetics.