Epistasis, the spice of life: Lesson from the study of the plant immune system

报 告 人：Prof. Detlef Weigel, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology

报告时间：2021年03月10日，下午14:00-15:30（Beijing）

报告方式：腾讯会议

会 议 ID:  858 404 863

直播链接：https://meeting.tencent.com/l/MVatAXTVLPU1

联 系 人：朱旺升 18622678182

Prof. Detlef Weigel, a German-American scientist, is currently Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology (www.weigelworld.org). He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Royal Society, and recipient of several scientific awards, most recently the Novozymes Prize of the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

The Weigel group (www.weigelworld.org) is addressing fundamental questions in evolutionary biology, using both genome- and phenotype-first approaches. A few years ago, they discovered that Arabidopsis thaliana is a great model for the study of hybrid necrosis. This widespread syndrome of hybrid failure in plants is caused by plant paranoia – regardless of the presence of enemies, plants “think” they are being attacked by pathogens. Over the past decade, the Weigel lab has studied in detail the underlying genetics, finding that often one or two loci encoding NLR immune receptors are causal. NLRs make up the most variable gene family in plants, and it is not surpris­ing that they are often involved in genome-genome conflicts. Hybrid necrosis results when NLR genes meet that have not been co-adapted. This has in turn raised the question of the scale of NLR diversity, and the goal for the next decade is to understand the genomic and geographic patterns of immune system and especially NLR diversity. In 2018, the Weigel lab initiated a project, PATHO(gens in Arabi)DOPSIS, in which they aim to describe genetic diversity in the host A. thaliana and two of its important pathogens, the generalist Pseudomonas sp. and the specialist Hyaloperonospora arabidopsidis. The long-term vision is to produce maps of resistance alleles in the host, and of effector alleles in the pathogens, in order to learn when the pathogens win in a wild plant pathosystem – and when the hosts prevail.

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