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Abstract

It is well-established that most plant pathogens produce a plethora of structurally different virulence effector proteins that are translocated into plant cells, where they manipulate multiple host cell processes for facilitating infection, reproduction and spread.  Genome analyses of many prokaryotic and eukaryotic plant pathogens have revealed unprecedented functional and structural diversity and complexity in these effectors.  Although genetic, molecular, structural and high throughput ‘omics’ approaches have led to significant advances in understanding a small number of these effectors, a holistic mechanistic understanding of a vast majority of them remains unexplored. Using high throughput transcriptomics and protein-protein interaction assays together with high throughput gene cloning and phenomics approaches, we are functionally analyzing effectors of oomycetes, bacteria and viruses. Findings from our lab together with those of others show that several effectors from diverse microbial pathogens converge on similar host proteins involved  in transcription, cytoskeleton, protein degradation, autophagy and cell signaling pathways, which I will discuss in my talk.  In addition, I will also discuss how to use effectors in investigating their plant and insect host targets using yeast-two hybrid analyses, bimolecular fluorescence complementation assays and genetic approaches.  I will also present some data from our lab on utilizing effectors of oomycetes and bacteria in accelerating identification and cloning of R genes using a recently developed ‘effectoromics’ approach.  In summary, fueled by unprecedented developments in metabolomics, transcriptomics, genomics and epigenomics, we have a chance to use pathogen effectors as a Swiss army knife not only for understanding molecular mechanisms of multidimensional interaction of hosts, microbes and environments, but also for discovering resistance genes and antimicrobial compounds and developing rapid diagnostic assays.

Lab webpage: http://mrec.ifas.ufl.edu/gsa/index.html