Finding a way in: understanding & controlling pathogenic fungi.

PhD Students Present: Finding a way in - understanding and controlling pathogenic fungi.

Summary:

Viral diversity and coevolution with fungal and oomycete pathogens.

Alexander Allman

Fungi and oomycetes suffer from viral infections. Despite many such infections appearing to cause no apparent effect on their fungus hosts, some mycoviruses reduce the ability of the fungus to cause disease. This offers an opportunity for developing virus-based methods of pathogen control to improve plant health. Just over 200 mycoviruses have been described to date and a great proportion of viral diversity remains uncharacterised. In this talk, Alex will describe how bioinformatics is enabling the identification and characterisation of novel viruses from publicly available sequence data.

Unlocking the door: How Fusarium graminearum exploits plasmodesmata during host-tissue colonisation.

Victoria Armer

Fusarium graminearum is the main causal agent of Fusarium Head Blight on small grain cereals, such as wheat. This filamentous fungal pathogen causes devastating crop losses, contaminating wheat grain with toxins that make the wheat kernels unsuitable for human and livestock consumption. F. graminearum uses plasmodesmata when colonising host tissue. These are cytoplasmic communication channels that bridge cell walls and have an instrumental role in plant defence against pathogens. Victoria’s talk will explore how fungal pathogens such as F. graminearum exploit plasmodesmata and what implications this might have for breeding resistant crops.

Benchmarking the mycobiome.

Neelu Begum

Despite huge strides in investigation of the human microbiome, analysis of the mycobiome is still in its infancy, with a need to deliver fungal-specific databases, pipelines and analysis tools to assist mycobiome research. In this talk, Neelu will describe how the BioFung database and other tools have been used to better understand the mycobiome's crucial role in human health and disease. The database was created to provide fungal-specific annotation of protein-encoding sequences and, following discovery of differences in metabolic pathways in invasive Candida species, exploration of data sets confirmed some of these pathways as potential targets for diagnostic markers. BioFung was also used to demonstrate fungal compositional changes in the progression of chronic liver disease.

About our speakers:

Alexander Allman is a PhD student in the Agriculture, Health & Environment Department of the Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich, supervised by Dr Andrew Armitage, Dr Goncalo D R Silva and Prof Susan E Seal. Alex is particularly interested in virology, mycology, mycoviruses and bioinformatics. Alex’s profile: https://www.nri.org/people/allman-alexander

Victoria Armer is a PhD student funded by the South West Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership under the supervision of Prof Kim Hammond-Kosack (Rothamsted Research) and Dr Mike Deeks (University of Exeter). Her research focuses on elucidating the role of plasmodesmata during Fusarium graminearum infection of wheat, through biochemical, molecular and microscopy techniques. Victoria’s profile: http://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/our-people/victoria-armer

Neelu Begum is a PhD candidate working under the supervision of Dr Saeed Shoaie and Dr David Moyes, King’s College London, using systems biology to explore the mycobiome. Neelu uses bioinformatic tools to translate multi-omics data and unpick metabolic interactions within the mycobiome. Neelu’s profile: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/neelu-begum