Master manipulators: How pathogens use effectors to cause disease

Plant diseases are a continuous threat to food production. They are a major constraint on achieving global food security against the background of climate change. Many plant diseases are caused by pathogens that deliver proteins known as effectors into host cells to manipulate host function for the benefit of the pathogen. Studying the function of pathogen effector proteins is essential to understanding the fundamental biology underpinning disease, but also provides new opportunities to interfere with disease progression and maintaining healthy plants/crops to feed the world. In this project, the student will investigate how the cereal killer Magnaporthe oryzae uses effectors to cause blast disease of grass crops including rice, wheat and barley. A set of novel effectors from M. oryzae will be studied using a variety of biochemical and biophysical techniques both in vitro and in plant tissue. The project will identify the host cell targets of selected effectors from plants, and (1) probe the details of interactions using biochemical and structural approaches, (2) investigate the impact of mutation (deletion and point mutations) on the ability of the pathogen to cause disease on plants.