Project Details
Projekt
Quantitative disease resistance and microbial interactions under abiotic stress
Subject Area
Organismic Interactions, Chemical Ecology and Microbiomes of Plant Systems
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 515385982
Plants possess a large diversity of immune-receptors allowing them to recognize and regulate the presence of pathogens. Some major resistance genes can confer complete resistance towards a given pathogen, however, in many cases, pathogen resistance is quantitative and impacted by different genetic and non-genetic factors. In this sub-project of the Research Unit (RU) PlantsCoChallenge we consider fungal pathogens as biotic stressors and we address the underlying factors that determine quantitative resistance (QR) against pathogens in the context of abiotic stress and adaptive evolution. To this end, we aim to conduct comparative analyses in two distinct plant species, the coastal plant species sea rocket, Cakile maritima and the cereal crop species barley (Hordeum vulgare). We will make use of unique plant populations to generate population genomic data to identify signatures of local adaptation and traits which have been subject to positive selection during local adaptation, or artificial selection during domestication in the case of H. vulgare. Furthermore, we have established infection assays with fungal pathogens, allowing us to investigate plant responses to biotic stress experimentally in the presence and absence of an additional abiotic stressor using temperature as an additional stress treatment. Hereby, we will use native isolates of the fungi Alternaria brassicicola for infection of C. maritima and Zymoseptoria passerinii for infection of H. vulgare. We will moreover investigate the impact of microbial association on the strength of QR by profiling of microbial diversity under different stress conditions, and in collaboration with the central project Z2. Integrative analyses of genome, transcriptome, metabolome and microbiome data will allow us to identify candidate genes defining QR in the two plant species. A long-term goal is to obtain mechanistic insights into their function and regulation. The sub-project will be tightly interlinked in the RU program allowing us to connect genetic and genomic data to experimental ecology studies (for C. maritima) and to molecular cell biology of biotic stress responses (for H. vulgare).
DFG Programme
Research Units
