Project description
Molecular insight into plant immunity
Like animals, plants become infected by pathogens and activate immune responses to combat them while balancing growth and fitness. However, little is known about this process, which is central for agriculture. Funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the ImmunoZoneHubs project aims to dissect the molecular and cellular mechanisms driving plant−pathogen interaction. Researchers will use the Arabidopsis thaliana plant as a model system and follow a multidisciplinary approach to investigate plant immunity. Apart from providing fundamental knowledge, results have broad implications for agriculture as they will support the design of technology-based sustainable strategies to overcome associated economic losses and social impacts.
Objective
Agriculture, which underpins the livelihoods of over 2.5 billion people, is nowadays confronted with an array of new threats including plant pests. This project tackles the urgent need to develop new, technology-based sustainable strategies to combat the constant agricultural losses and economic drain derived from plant pests, which have been worsened because of climate change. The understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlaying plant pathogen interaction and defence responses is not only a fundamental scientific challenge, but it is also relevant to practical applications. Despite decades of research on host-pathogen interactions, knowledge on fundamental aspects of the plant immune system is still missing. This proposal provides an excellent opportunity to help filling this gap of knowledge as it targets the question of how cells translate molecular pathogen recognition into immune cell death, and how dying cells and their neighbours communicate to tightly control this process and ensure the proper balance in between defence responses and plant growth and fitness. To address this question, I have designed a multidisciplinary and international project using Arabidopsis thaliana plant as a model system to study the molecular determinants of plant immune cell death zonation and the involvement of plant metacaspases, distant relatives of animal caspases, in cell death. A plethora of techniques including molecular and biochemistry techniques, plant phenotyping and engineering, FACS and cell biology microscopy techniques will be used for the proper execution of this project. In addition to generate high-impact knowledge in plant immunity that will ultimately impact on society, this proposal will provide me with the expertise, resources, training, and network to become extremely competitive in the field of molecular plant pathology, helping me to progress in my scientific career and to achieve my scientific goals.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteins
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesopticsmicroscopy
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepathology
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
08193 Cerdanyola Del Valles
Spain