This research will enable important advances in sustainable agriculture and food security to be achieved. The project investigates how disease-causing microbes deploy groups of molecules to damage plants. The information gleaned will be used for college curriculum development. Furthermore, it will be disseminated to scientists through peer-reviewed publications and the general public through discussions at public community festivals. Diverse students will receive cutting edge training as they work to achieve the goals of the project.
Bacterial plant pathogens translocate into plants effector proteins that form physical and functional networks that suppress plant defenses and thus damage plants. A new perspective is that effectors encounter each other in multiple compartments (microbe and host). Emergent functions of effector consortia include additive and antagonistic behaviors that arise from interactions between the effectors, some of which lead to posttranslational modifications (PTMs). The goal of this research is to determine whether effector network biochemical interactions events occur in bacteria as well as in plants, and to further characterize network interactions, with a focus on whether effectors form higher order complexes. The approaches include mass spectrometry to detect effector-catalyzed PTMs and binding experiments to investigate effector-effector interactions and the impact of PTMs on them.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
