Research Interests

Unlike animals, plants cannot move away from adverse conditions. Plants face increased threats from fungal and bacterial pathogens, some of which are gaining advantage as the climate becomes more favourable to them. To protect crops from major losses we need to understand how plants defend themselves and how we can exploit this.

Our laboratory addresses the important question of how plants respond to pathogen attack. This research will inform us as to where molecular biology and breeding approaches could be directed to optimise the existing cellular machinery to boost crop plant resistance to pathogens.

The lab uses both model and crop (tomato, brassica) plants to understand how pathogens are recognised and how plant immunity is supressed by pathogens.

We combine genome-wide approaches such as mRNA-seq, ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq and MNase-seq with proteomics, advance imaging, and biochemistry to enhance our understanding of how activation of Pattern Recognition Receptors (PRRs) and Resistance (R) proteins leads to plant immunity.

This research informs our efforts to engineering crop plants with durable resistance and increased crop yields.