Research Focus

Research Focus

Many economic crop plants are suffering from various plant pathogens, leading to crop yield reduction. Developing effective and environment-friendly agent for improving plant health against pathogen is an urgent topic. To combat diverse microbial pathogens, plants have developed two systemic immune mechanisms against next pathogen invasion. Systemic acquired resistance (SAR) is triggered by prior infection-pathogen whereas induced systemic resistance (ISR) is induced by beneficial rhizosphere microbes. Long-distance mobile signals are required for initiating both systems, and they also affect plant physiology. However, the nature of mobile signals and how these signals are perceived, amplified, and/or attenuated in distal and uninfected tissue are still not clear.

Our research will focus on:

1) Discovering the critical small molecules produced by plant or rhizosphere microbes to initiate systemic resistance.

2) Investigating the underlying molecular mechanism of small molecule elicited defense.

3) Understanding the crosstalk between SAR and ISR.

We expect these studies will provide new insight into developing safe and efficient agents for triggering broad-spectrum resistance in different crop plants.