In the natural soil environment, a plant is constantly required to combat a diverse range of pathogens that aim to bypass its multi-step defense machinery. Upon successful infection, pathogens can completely destroy an entire crop population. Through proper understanding of plant-pathogen interactions, including behavioral traits, it will be possible to develop effective, sustainable control strategies against plant diseases.
This CAREER project will develop a new engineering platform to observe, sense, and modulate interactions between plant roots and pathogens. The research plan is to accomplish the following tasks: (i) develop a Plant-in-a-Chip system for the growth of Arabidopsis plants and application of pathogens, (ii) realize chemical schemes for sensing and modulating the auxin (an important plant hormone) profile in roots under pathogenic attack using synthetic chemicals, and (iii) build on-chip electrical schemes for sensing root health and manipulating pathogenic interactions with roots. An adaptive image-tracking program will be built for real-time observation of root responses.
Intellectual Merit: The lack of microscale systems has limited the scope of experiments in plant pathology to soil pots and petri-dishes that have low spatiotemporal resolution to adequately characterize plant-pathogen interactions. The proposed system promises a huge improvement in throughput (growing multiple plants on a single chip), resolution (imaging single root cells), design flexibility (altering chemical and electrical environment), and information content (real-time observation of root responses). These studies will complement existing gene sequencing efforts, thereby speeding the research to create pathogen-resistant plants.
Broader Impact: The proposed research aims to study an important and neglected area of engineering research ? interkingdom signaling and behavioral functions of disease-related plant genes. This will help provide key answers to why, how and when certain pathogens invade certain crops, thereby helping us engineer disease-resistant transgenic plants. Considering the importance, complexity and diversity of host-pathogen relations, we anticipate the proposed system will advance knowledge in several disciplines such as genetics, agronomy, entomology, bioinformatics, behavioral science, and human health. The educational plan is to develop a novel bioengineering track for electrical engineering undergraduates that will bring together students, particularly females and underrepresented minorities, into this exciting multidisciplinary research environment.
