Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

Fungal natural products for food safety: towards biocontrol of cereal blast diseases by disrupting the novel target septins.

Objective

A consequence of climate change is the emergence of fungal plant diseases in Europe. Blast disease on cereal crops is an economically important plant disease caused by the fungus Pyricularia oryzae and poses a significant threat to global food security. While initially well known as the major disease on rice, wheat blast has recently emerged and is of major concern in wheat production areas since P. oryzae has already developed resistance against most used fungicides. Sustainable solutions for the biocontrol of the cereal blast disease are needed, and active fungal natural products inhibiting novel targets represent a promising alternative.
Septin proteins are essential for the pathogenicity of P. oryzae and other fungal plant pathogens and their absence in land plants makes them compelling targets. Yet, no product has been developed to target fungal septins. In a preliminary study, we employed a self-resistance guided genome mining approach to identify candidate biosynthetic pathways of fungal natural products which contain a septin decoy gene. Two biosynthetic pathways were found to likely produce septin-disrupting compounds. I propose to investigate these candidate pathways and validate their potential to control cereal blast. First, wild fungal species containing the identified pathways will be tested for septin-disrupting activity using in vitro fluorescence microscopy-based assay. Second, a synthetic biology approach to activate these candidate pathways in the heterologous host Aspergillus oryzae will aid in characterizing natural compounds and their structure-activity relationships. Finally, natural septin-disrupting compounds will be tested for their ability and efficacy to control blast disease in planta. During TargetSep, I will embark on a multidisciplinary journey to discover natural solutions to control a disease that threatens food safety, while developing various skills like leadership and science communication to fulfill my scientific pursuits.

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. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Coordinator

KONINKLIJKE NEDERLANDSE AKADEMIE VAN WETENSCHAPPEN - KNAW
Net EU contribution
€ 232 916,16
Address
KLOVENIERSBURGWAL 29 HET TRIPPENHUIS
1011 JV AMSTERDAM
Netherlands

See on map

Activity type
Research Organisations
Links
Total cost
No data
My booklet 0 0