Title: From perception to downstream signalling in plant microbe interaction

Plants are sessile organisms exposed to a variety of environmental challenges including pathogen infection. Through evolution, plants have evolved two strategies of pathogen perception, extracellular recognition by transmembrane receptors, and intracellular recognition by multi-domain resistance proteins. Despite our advances in the identification of immune receptors a gap exists in our knowledge between recognition and downstream functional immunity. We address the fundamental questions of how plant cells transduce receptor activation to downstream signalling in order to express a subset of genes and respond appropriately to pathogen infection. We also take advantage of strategies employed by plant pathogenic microbes to create tools for synthetic biology.