Investigating fungal pathogen effector localisation within plant cells

Ensuring global food security for the ever-growing world's population is a major concern. Fungal pathogens destroy a substantial amount of all food crops each year (~15%). Cereal head blight diseases of wheat caused by various Fusarium fungi are particularly serious (Dean et al., 2012). These pathogens secrete effector proteins that manipulate the host to promote infection. Some effectors were predicted to enter host organelles using software tools that search for sequence signatures associated with subcellular targeting. However, these prediction might not be accurate as only for a few fungal effectors has their subcellular localisation been validated. Robust predictions are required to identify virulence changes in the pathogen population associated with differences in effector host subcellular localisation. We will use multiple software tools to perform an in-silico meta-analytic prediction of the secretome of multiple Fusarium graminearum strains and identify effectors likely to have host subcellular localisation before validating these predictions in the laboratory using in planta expression and confocal microscopy. Validated localisation data will be used to improve the accuracy of prediction tools. Then the plant protein targets from some effectors will be identified by co-immunoprecipitation or proximity labelling followed by mass spectrometry. Plant targets identification will allow the elucidation of effector function(s). This new knowledge will permit the student and the advisory team to devise new F. graminearum control strategies. The project is multidisciplinary with strong mathematical, computational biology and imaging components.