Item

Abstract

Plants are under constant attack from pathogens and have evolved cell-surface pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) and intracellular nucleotide-binding, leucine rich repeat containing receptor (NLR) receptors to detect pathogen-associated molecules and pathogen-secreted effector proteins to protect themselves from disease. Transcriptional reprogramming and hypersensitive cell death response (HR) are two key features of effective plant defense. While this has been well-studied in the past decades, the tissue and cell-type specificity of responses has been largely ignored due to technical limitations. Here we are investigating the cell-type specific plant defense response using Pseudomonas syringae with or without effector AvrRpt2 to infect Arabidopsis leaves and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA seq) to monitor the transcriptome changes at different timepoints. We are addressing: how do different cell types respond to pathogens? We are also exploiting the published plant scRNA seq data to investigating if the differences and similarities can be explained by expression patterns of PRRs, NLRs, and known convergent downstream immune signaling components, and how do they change after defense activation?