Rising global temperatures lead to billions of dollars of crop losses each year, either directly through heat waves and drought, for example, or indirectly by exacerbating damage from pests and pathogens, which already account for a ~40% decrease in agricultural production. These impacts contribute to increased food costs and widespread malnutrition.
To combat these challenges, our lab uses a wide range of wet-lab and modeling approaches to uncover mechanisms governing three-way interactions between plants, the microbiome, and elevated temperature. Overall, improving our understanding of higher order, interkingdom interactions will contribute to novel agricultural approaches to control disease, identify emerging pathogens, and predict outcomes in future, likely different environmental conditions.
Our driving questions include:
- How do microbiota-induced changes in plant surfaces impact plant health at elevated temperature?
- What role do microbial communities play in preventing plant disease outbreaks or, alternatively, serving as a reservoir for emerging pathogens?
- How do “plant-microorganism-environment” triangular interactions change under environmental conditions associated with a warming climate?
We are exploring these questions through two main themes:
Microbiome impact on plant performance at elevated temperature
Plants have both structural and dynamic physiological barriers to abiotic and biotic stress. Our research shows that both types of barriers change in response to the combination of colonization and elevated temperature in ways that impact disease resistance, abiotic stress tolerance, and overall plant health. We want to understand the mechanisms behind physical changes to the leaf cuticle and cell wall as well as the physiological changes to hormone signaling and immune responses in this combined context.
Role of extracellular vesicles in microbiome-plant interactions
Underlying three-way interactions are means of transporting information across kingdoms of life. Extracellular vesicles from microbes and plants are key players in cross-kingdom communication that directly impact plant health. For example, exposure to bacterial extracellular vesicles can function like a vaccine for plants, protecting against future infection from a variety of pathogens. Our lab aims to define how this protection occurs as well as how vesicles from the microbiome community shape community structure and plant immune responses.
Publications
