Project description:With this experiment we aimed do identify eventual genes that are differentially expressed by the fungal pathogen Blumeria graminis triticale when it grows on two different hosts (wheat and triticale)
Project description:With this experiment we aimed do identify eventual genes that are differentially expressed by the fungal pathogen Blumeria graminis triticale when it grows on two different hosts (wheat and triticale) We used to fungal isolates, for each of them we infected wheat and triticale and we extracted RNA (and sequenced) from the infected plant tissue. Three technical replicates for each combinations plant-pathogen were used
Project description:The availability of organic carbon represents a major bottleneck for the development of soil microbial communities and the regulation of microbially-mediated ecosystem processes. However, there is still a lack of knowledge on how the lifestyle and population abundances are physiologically regulated by the availability of energy and organic carbon in soil ecosystems. To date, functional insights into the lifestyles of microbial populations have been limited by the lack of straightforward approaches to the tracking of the active microbial populations. Here, by the use of an comprehensiv metaproteomics and genomics, we reveal that C-availability modulates the lifestyles of bacterial and fungal populations in drylands and determines the compartmentalization of functional niches. This study highlights that the active diversity (evaluated by metaproteomics) but not the diversity of the whole microbial community (estimated by genome profiling) is modulated by the availability of carbon and is connected to the ecosystem functionality in drylands.
Project description:We revealed that a rhamnolipid protects wheat against the hemibiotrophic fungal pathogen Zymoseptoria tritici. Foliar application of the biomolecule primes, during the early stages of infection, the expression of genes associated with different functional groups of genes.
Project description:Anthropogenic nutrient inputs alter soil biodiversity; however, it remains largely unknown whether changes in soil microeukaryotes (fungi and protists) are primarily driven by direct effects, such as modifications in soil properties, or by indirect effects, such as plant diversity loss. To disentangle these mechanisms, we investigated the long-term effects (11 years) of fertilization and manipulated plant diversity (1, 2, or 4 plant species) on soil microeukaryote communities in a temperate grassland experiment using long-amplicon rRNA sequencing. Our results indicate that fertilization generally had a stronger influence on microeukaryote communities than plant species richness. Fertilization altered the community composition of fungi and protists, increased OTU richness by 20.8% and 52.7%, respectively, and shifted community dominance from fungi to protists. Regarding plant diversity, we observed an effect exclusively on the protist community. Changes were primarily explained by increased plant biomass (driven by both fertilization and plant diversity) and by higher soil phosphorus and lower soil pH levels (driven exclusively by fertilization). Regarding life strategies, we observed synergistic treatment effects: fertilization primarily enhanced fungal saprophytes (only richness), fungal animal pathogens, and protist consumers, whereas plant diversity affected phototrophic protists (reduction) and protist animal pathogens (enhancement). Notably, fertilization and plant diversity decline together led to a cumulative increase in fungal plant pathogens. In conclusion, we highlight that fertilisation alone has a significant effect on soil microeukaryotes, while the additional decline in plant diversity affects different soil groups that are not directly affected by fertilisation. This synergistic pattern indicates that fertilization can influence the entire microeukaryote community through direct and indirect mechanisms, with a cumulative enhancement on certain groups, such as plant pathogens.
Project description:The human gut acts as the main reservoir of microbes and a relevant source of life-threatening infections, especially in immunocompromised patients. There, the opportunistic fungal pathogen Candida albicans adapts to the host environment and additionally interacts with residing bacteria. We investigated fungal-bacterial interactions by coinfecting enterocytes with the yeast Candida albicans and the Gram-negative bacterium Proteus mirabilis resulting in enhanced host cell damage. This synergistic effect was conserved across different P. mirabilis isolates and occurred also with non-albicans Candida species and C. albicans mutants defective in filamentation or candidalysin production. Using bacterial deletion mutants, we identified the P. mirabilis hemolysin HpmA to be the key effector for host cell destruction. Spatially separated coinfections demonstrated that synergism between Candida and Proteus is induced by contact, but also by soluble factors. Specifically, we identified Candida-mediated glucose consumption and farnesol production as potential triggers for Proteus virulence. In summary, our study demonstrates that coinfection of enterocytes with C. albicans and P. mirabilis can result in increased host cell damage which is mediated by bacterial virulence factors as a result of fungal niche modification via nutrient consumption and production of soluble factors. This supports the notion that certain fungal-bacterial combinations have the potential to result in enhanced virulence in niches such as the gut and might therefore promote translocation and dissemination.
Project description:The aim of this work is to dissect the plant component of the dual-proteome established during the FHB process using the same three wheat cultivars facing the three fungal strains as described in Fabre et al. (2019b). Qualitative and quantitative dissection of the three wheat cultivar proteomes was devoted to identify molecular events that drive the FHB-susceptibility differences. This included, the identification of (i) the generic molecular adjustments taking place during FHB progress, (ii) the cultivar-specific responses and their accommodation with different F. graminearum strains inducing FHB and (iii) the range of wheat proteins that basically discriminate the three wheat cultivars of contrasted susceptibility. The joint analysis of all these data with the fungal protein information was carried out to identify relationship between wheat protein abundance changes and fungal effectors differentially accumulated between the three F. graminearum strains (Fabre et al., 2019b).