Project description
Strengthening plant immunity for global food security
Crop losses caused by plant diseases, driven by rapidly evolving pathogens and worsened by climate change, pose a major global threat to food security. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the RESISTOME project aims to provide a detailed mechanistic insight into plant immunity to provide leads for increased pathogen resistance. Using in vivo cross-linking techniques and high-sensitivity mass spectrometry, the project will capture rare and short-lived interactions between pathogen and plant proteins inside living tissues. Experiments in tomato plants will allow researchers to reconstruct the sequence of immune responses during infection and create 3D models of immune receptor complexes. The ultimate goal is to help engineer crops with more durable disease resistance.
Objective
Plant diseases destroy crops such as wheat, tomato, and corn and cause losses exceeding €180 billion each year, a threat that climate change makes worse by speeding pathogen evolution and resistance breakdown. The RESISTOME project addresses this threat by mapping the physical contacts between pathogen proteins and plant proteins that trigger or block immunity. Many of these contacts are brief and rare and occur inside intact plant tissue, so they escape conventional methods. To catch them, RESISTOME will develop in vivo cross linking methods adapted for plant cells, a chemical approach that fixes pairs of proteins that touch each other so they can be identified later. These cross links will be recovered and identified by mass spectrometry after testing conditions in both isolated plant cells and whole tissues. At the same time the project will modernize cross linking mass spectrometry by using a fast scanning Orbitrap Astral instrument with narrow window data independent acquisition to increase sensitivity and sampling, allowing detection of low abundance and transient interactions across the proteome. Applied to the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and to tomato, this workflow will be used during controlled pathogen challenges and time resolved experiments to rebuild the sequence of molecular events that follow infection. Cross link distance measurements will be combined with structural predictions to produce three dimensional models of immune receptor complexes and of how pathogen effectors target susceptibility proteins. The resulting proteome wide structural atlas of plant immune interactions will identify mechanistic targets and assays that can guide breeding and engineering for durable resistance. The MSCA fellowship will support the interdisciplinary training required to integrate proteomics, structural modeling, and plant biology needed to translate methods from model plants to crops.
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: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences biochemistry biomolecules proteins proteomics
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries agriculture grains and oilseeds cereals
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
6700AE Wageningen
Netherlands
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.