RNA regulation for plant viral immunity and stress resilience

Through a constantly ongoing arms race and conflicts of interests, plant viruses acquire mechanistically diverse strategies to exploit host cellular pathways and reduce viral immunity.

This manipulative diversity of the virosphere thus provides an intriguing tool for systematic studies of selected host cellular processes and mechanisms that are pivotal for, and thus targeted by, viruses.

The overarching aim of my research is to study how selected RNA metabolic pathways regulate virus infections generally as well as utilize the diversity of viruses to uncover novel molecular mechanisms of these pathways in plant resilience.

To enable these goals, my team has recently established a highly diverse virus collection and an associated virus effector library for the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. These resources will be applied in molecular phenotyping pipelines for prominent resilience pathways.

The concept will be to detect multiple and diverse viral manipulations and delineate underlying mechanistic causalities.

I further argue that the multispecies dimension of our study will offer new perspectives to systems virology and plant interactions and greatly advance our understanding of plant resilience molecular biology, key knowledge for ensuring future food security and sustainability.