University of California, Davis - Plant Perceptions of Pathogens

My name is Dinesh-Kumar, I go by Dinesh. I’m in UC Davis Department of Plant Biology. I’m also affiliated with the Genome Center.

My lab's major goal is to understand how pathogens infect plants and also how plants actually are able to recognize the pathogen and activate an immune response. And in that process, we study quite a variety of projects where the growth chambers and CF facility has been instrumental.

There are three specific plants we work with. One is Arabidopsis as a model system which many plant scientists works on. We also use tomato and also the Nicotiana which is tobacco, so these are some of the plants we use. And the pathogens we use are the viral pathogens like tobacco mosaic virus as a model system we use quite a bit. And then we use the Pseudomonas bacteria and then we also use Botrytis fungus in our studies.

So we’re mainly interested in how these multiple plant systems responds to different pathogens. Idea is to see what are the common responses a plant invokes to different pathogens across different species. And then what are the specific responses in the individual species of plants invoke to different pathogens.

So one example is the main receptor we work on in tobacco – when we put it in the Arabidopsis it does not work. So the idea there is to understand why when we put from tobacco to Arabidopsis it does not work, even though both are plants.

So there are some fundamental difference between what’s present in Arabidopsis versus what present in tobacco. So that’s why these different plant systems and different pathogens help us to understand the common processes and also very specific processes.

So one idea is to better understand the process from the plant point of view. So then maybe we can better engineer plants to cope with the diseases so that we don’t have to use these harmful chemicals. From the basic point of view, it so happens that the plant immune receptors seem to be similar to the human immune receptors. So when we first cloned our first plant immune receptor when I was a Post-doc at Berkeley, and we were surprised to find out that the receptors almost looked similar to the mammalian immune receptors that are also involved in pathogen resistance.

So in the global context I think what we learn from plant, could be actually adaptable to the human pathogen systems actually, and vice versa.