How fungal pathogens communicate with plant cells and cause disease

Climatic, environmental and societal changes led to the evolution of novel crop pathogens. Many new pathogen problems have evolved which now regularly threaten global crop production. Phytopathogenic species which cause crop plant diseases are annually responsible for the loss of ~15% of total crop yield globally and are therefore a serious threat to global food security. Particularly serious are Fusarium ear blight (FEB)/head scab disease caused by cereal infecting Fusaria fungi (www.scabusa.org) and Zymoseptoria tritici infections in wheat crops (Dean (2012) Molecular Plant Pathology 13, 414-430), both will be studied in this PhD project.
The main scientific aims of this project are (A) to investigate both the cellular and molecular mechanisms in wheat required for the transition of Fusarium graminearum hyphae from apoplastic to plasmodesmatal growth (Brown (2010), Fungal Biology 114, 555-571) and (B) to explore the functional role(s) of specific plasmodesmata associated wheat proteins (Faulkner (2013) PNAS, 110, 9166-9170). To achieve the project aims the student will learn how to use a range of existing tools (fungal reporter strains, wheat transformants), established techniques (RNA seq analyses, light/UV/confocal microscopy, Virus Induced Gene Silencing (VIGS) (Lee (2012) Plant Physiology 160, 582-590) and emerging technologies (genome editing). They will also be trained in the use of bespoke software to quantify and mathematically model the in vivo fungal-plant image datasets acquired from their detailed microscopy studies.