Plant Immune Sensing Cells in Early Pathogen Invasion
20 Years of Controlled Environment Research
University of California, Davis
Presented by Conviron
Gitta Coaker | Associate Professor
Department of Plant Pathology, University of California, Davis
One of the biggest challenges to humans in general is going to be dealing with how are we going to feed the world in a changing climate with an increase in global population?
My name is Gitta Coaker, I’m an associate professor at the University of California Davis in the department of plant pathology. My group works on the interaction between bacterial pathogens and plants and we work with a different variety of different plants at the controlled environmental facility here at UC Davis. We primarily work on the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. We also work with Nicotiana benthamiana and we also work with tomato. What we’re really interested in my lab is to gain a mechanistic understanding of how the plant can use its innate or preformed immune system to recognize bacterial pathogens.
Numerous genetic screens were conducted in the 90′s and the early 2000′s and they’ve identified a clear set of genes that are really important for immunity. But, what’s thought now is to identify the existing genes there may be some functional redundancy at play, etc. So a lot of the proteins and genes we work with may have some subtle phenotypes. So there it’s really important to be able to have precise control to be able to accurately measure phenotypes and be able to do that over multiple replications in many different plants to have appropriate statistics.
So we found that actually the majority of immune receptors in plants whether they have extra cellular domains or whether they’re primarily present inside plant cells. They’re expressed at the RNA and protein level in guard cells. We’ve also found that the components that they monitor at important key signaling proteins downstream are also present in guard cells. So those appear to actually truly be effective immune sensing cells.
What we’ve done now is we’ve made tissue specific promoters where we’re only expressing an immune receptor in guard cells, only in epidermal cells and only mesophyll cells. Preliminary results from that indicate that guard cells are active immune sensing cells they can dynamically respond and they’re responsible for limiting early pathogen invasion.
We know that plants can be attacked by all classes of pathogens and that can cause significant yield losses and even decimate certain crops depending on the environmental conditions. We know that climate change is going to result in more severe weather patterns. So we need to have a better understanding of how the plant recognizes different pathogens. How it can respond to those pathogens.
Truly, if we can understand the genetics and also the biochemistry and cell biological changes that occur. Then we can engineer either through genetic engineering or through traditional breeding crops that can more effectively resist pathogens in the field.
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Post time: Sep-20-2017