Distinguished Professor Indiana University Bloomington Bloomington, Indiana, United States
I am extremely honored and grateful to be receiving IS-MPMI’s Career Achievement Award. In this talk, I will provide a few highlights of my career, while still leaving time for updates on exciting recent developments. The theme that will emerge is that unexpected results often lead to the most exciting new directions. I will start with how I got hooked on MPMI research as a graduate student, investigating how Rhizobium bacteria recognize legume roots. From there, I will recap my fortuitous move as a postdoc to switch from bacterial genetics to plant genetics, and my contributions to developing Arabidopsis as a model system for MPMI studies. I will then highlight the most exciting discoveries made during my early faculty days at Indiana University, including the discovery that a single plant disease resistance gene can mediate recognition of multiple pathogen ‘avirulence’ genes, which led to the development of the ‘guard model’. Understanding the molecular mechanisms underpinning the guard model kept us busy for the ensuing 20 years. I will highlight the key advances that are now enabling us to engineer novel disease resistance traits in crop plants using decoy substrates of pathogen effectors. Lastly, I will recap our recent work on extracellular vesicles and extracellular RNAs, and our surprising finding that plants secrete abundant RNAs onto their leaf surfaces. We believe these exRNAs play a central role in structuring the leaf microbiome and in maintaining plant health. In support of this prediction, I will present very recent evidence that leaf surface RNA mediates host-induced gene silencing targeting fungal genes.
