Thursday, September 2, 2021
3:00 – 4:30 p.m. (AST)
On Zoom
Passcode: 446008
Lessons from plant-microbe associations in evolutionarily divergent plant lineages
By Sebastian Schornack
Senior Gatsby Group Leader and Royal Society University Research Fellow, Sainsbury Laboratory (SLCU), University of Cambridge, UK; Full Affiliate, Dept. Plant Sciences, Cambridge, UK
Abstract
Plantlife is tightly linked to filamentous microbes. Fungal associations with roots have helped plants to conquer land and continue to provide nutritional benefits. On the other hand, disease-causing filamentous pathogens like oomycetes and fungi are a permanent thread to agriculture. Understanding how plants engage with or defend against microbes helps to fortify crops and supports sustainable agriculture.
This presentation will introduce plant interactions with filamentous microbes. It will highlight how the study of divergent plant lineages such as flowering plants and liverworts has informed our understanding of conserved and lineage-specific mechanisms underpinning symbiosis and defence. It will also provide a discussion basis on how agriculture can benefit from this knowledge.
Our own papers on this topic:
- Delaux and Schornack, Review 2021,DOI: 10.1126/science.aba6605
- Carella 2018; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1717900115
- Carella 2019;DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.05.078
About the speaker
- Diploma and Ph.D. at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany
- Postdoc with Dr. Thomas Lahaye, Institute of Biology, Halle, Germany
- Postdoc with Professor Sophien Kamoun, The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich, UK
- Senior Gatsby Group Leader and Royal Society University Research Fellow, Sainsbury Laboratory (SLCU), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK; Full Affiliate, Dept. Plant Sciences, Cambridge, UK
I am a Senior Gatsby Group Leader at the Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University (SLCU) and I am fascinated by plants and their interactions with microorganisms. My group focuses on plant development processes impacting the colonisation by filamentous microbes- an area of study with a perspective for durable quantitative resistance.
As a diploma and Ph.D. student, I have studied bacterial interactions and a tomato plant disease resistance gene and then co-discovered the TAL effector code of DNA binding domains. I switched to oomycetes because filamentous microbes offer a greater potential for studying how an invading microbe reprograms the host cell. A good example is microbial effectors which control defence processes specifically at plant intracellular haustoria formed by pathogenic Phytophthora and my postdoc time at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich allowed me to explore those and also nuclear localised Crinkler effectors in more detail.
In Cambridge, our current experimental systems encompass the broad host range pathogen Phytophthora palmivora and the symbiotic arbuscular mycorrhiza fungus Rhizophagus irregularis. Both microbes form intracellular interfaces within plant cells. We use them to study the extent to which beneficial and pathogenic microbes rely on the same plant mechanisms for their colonisation. More recently we have used macroevolutionary approaches using the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha to identify these evolutionarily conserved genes and strategies for colonisation and plant defence.
I enjoy communicating science and I am active on social media (Twitter: @dromius, Scoop. it blogs on TAL effectors and cell biology, Tumblr. When time allows, I am pursuing the hunt for beetles.
Brought to you by the Center for Desert Agriculture.