Award details

The impact of environmental variation on plant disease and development

Reference	BB/D524683/1
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor James Brown
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors	Dr Mary Byrne, Professor Chris Lamb, Professor Paul Nicholson, Professor Anne Osbourn
Institution	John Innes Centre
Department	Disease and Stress Biology
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	93,685
Status	Completed
Type	Research Grant
Start date	01/12/2005
End date	31/08/2006
Duration	9 months

Abstract

We propose to buy 18 Snijder scientific plant growth chambers. The majority of the research to be done with these chambers is on the effect of environmental conditions on plant disease, researching the interaction of abiotic stress with costs of characters related to pathogenic and of plant resistance to disease, and investigating the effect of environmental conditions on complex processes involved in disease. i) we will investigate the effect of environmental conditions, especially stressful conditions, on fitness penalties of fungicide resistance in fungal pathogens of wheat. Similarly, the effect of environmental conditions on fitness costs of virulence will be studied. This research is of fundamental interest in coevolution and the population biology of adaptation, but will also provide important inputs for management of disease in UK arable crops. ii) The impact of abiotic stress on the cost of expressing resistance to disease will be investigated. This will involve research on interactions between different defence pathways and will use defined genotypes of arabidopsis. Current knowledge about the role of systemic acquired resistance in generating fitness costs of resisting disease will be extended and generalised to diverse diseases of arabidopsis. This and the following point are examples of the transfer of knowledge from model systems to crop plants and vice-versa. iii) Trade-offs between resistances to biotrophic and necrotrophic diseases will be analysed. The complexity of the three way interactions (plant ¿ necrotroph ¿ biotroph) means that this research must be done in defined, highly reproducible environmental conditions. iv) Natural product pathways and functions of natural products will be studied by a combination of targeted and systems biology approaches. These experiments are also highly sensitive to environmental conditions. This research will provide novel information about the function and evolutionary origin of natural product diversity and its relation to disease. In addition, the cabinets will be ideal for experiments on plant development, notably leaf development mutants which are highly sensitive to environmental conditions. This research therefore requires accurate, repeatable controlled environment conditions. i) We will determine the light requirements for the piggyback (pgy) phenotype of leaf development in arabidopsis, analyse genetic interactions between pgy mutants in different complementation groups and study genes required for leaf patterning, which are targets of PGY genes. In due course, the results of this new research project on arabidopsis will be related to leaf and development and shoot architecture in cereals.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Plant & Microbial Sciences (PMS)
Research Topics	X – not assigned to a current Research Topic
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	Research Equipment Initiative 2005 (RE5) [2005]
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

I accept the terms and conditions of use (opens in new window)

export PDF file

back to list new search