Pathogenic fungi pose serious threats to agricultural productivity. Fusarium oxysporum, an ascomycete fungus, is known to cause vascular wilt in over 100 plant species, including tomato, cotton, watermelon and banana, resulting in billions of dollars annual yield loss. The Ma lab's long-term goal is to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying Fusarium pathogenesis and plant defense for the development of disease resistant crops. This CAREER project will study both pathogenesis of F. oxysporum and plant defense using an established F. oxysporum - Arabidopsis pathosystem. A deeper understanding of this important pathogen will provide novel insights into interactions between soil-borne fungi and plant hosts. The advanced knowledge of plants defense against fungal pathogens will facilitate the development of durable disease-resistant crops. Therefore the research has the potential to transform world-wide disease management of many important crops that suffer from Fusarium wilts. Using the data and hypotheses generated from this research program, the PI will develop a Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) as part of the undergraduate curriculum at both UMass Amherst and Dominican College, a teaching intense college, whose students are 40% first generation college students, 66% women and over 40% minority students. Student participation will also bring fresh minds into the proposed research, increase the reproducibility and advance science.
Fungal effectors manipulate host immunity and contribute significantly to the outcomes of fungal-plant relationships, ranging from pathogenic to mutualistic. This CAREER project will study F. oxysporum effector biology taking diverse approaches that include computational biology, reverse genetics, quantitative biophysics and live image analysis. Specifically, this project will first characterize function of 300 candidate effectors using reverse genetics (Aim 1). Then, functionally important effectors will be monitored to trace effector trafficking using quantitative biophysics and live cell imaging (Aim 2). Finally the project will dissect effector regulation through network modeling (Aim 3). Following a step-wise approach, this project will funnel through a large dataset and finally focus on a few important effectors. Built on an interdisciplinary collaboration, the project will introduce quantitative biophysics into the investigation of fungal effector biology. This approach will provide unprecedented, quantitative and transparent information at the cellular and molecular level on the interactions between fungal effectors and their host plant cells. A major Educational Objective of this CAREER project is to create an undergraduate course in which students test hypotheses generated in Aim 3 and bring authentic research into undergraduate education by integrating ChIPseq into our undergraduate curriculum.
