Unlike animals, plants lack a specialized immune system. Plant cells while performing their normal functions also have to defend against pathogen infection. This makes it difficult to study plant immunity independently of other biological processes. To fully understand how plants respond to pathogen challenge, a 'systems biology' approach is most likely to uncover key regulatory networks underlying plant immunity and how they interface with processes like growth and development. The investigators of this project are in a unique position to carry out systems biology studies of plant immunity because of their pioneering work in using the model organism Arabidopsis in identifying essential components for all the major plant defense response pathways and in establishing a framework for placing these diverse components in an integrated network. However, there are still many parts missing in this network, including the identities of resistance output components and their regulators. Another major challenge is to understand the interconnections between the different immune responses. This project aims to identify these missing components and to build not only a static network but also dynamic models of the plant immune system. The results obtained from this project will be published in peer-reviewed journals and disseminated at meetings. Mutants and transgenic lines will be deposited in the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center. Large data sets will be deposited in public databases (e.g., NCBI's GEO for microarray and RNA seq data) as well as in the project database (http://ausubellab.mgh.harvard.edu/nsf2010/index.jsp) prior to or at the time of publication. Understanding plant adaptive mechanisms to environmental stress is one of the objectives of the NSF2010 Project. The success of this project will lead to better, environmentally friendly strategies for controlling crop diseases and will provide excellent training opportunities for undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows in classical genetics, phytopathology as well as cutting-edge genomics and bioinformatics technologies.
