General goals and research questions

Despite the enormous damage that fungal diseases cause to agriculture, the mechanisms that govern interactions between pathogenic fungi and plants are poorly understood. Our group studies the molecular mechanisms of fungal diseases of cereal crops and natural crop disease resistance to decipher the molecular dialogue in plant-pathogen interactions and to gain knowledge for sustainable crop protection.

Research topics

The interaction between plants and fungal pathogens is characterized by a complex molecular dialogue that involves fungal virulence effectors, the molecules and processes these effectors target in host plants and plant immune receptors that can recognize the pathogen and neutralize him by activating defense reactions.

We study these key players in disease and immunity by multidisciplinary research involving biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, genomics and plant pathology along three major axes:

• elucidate the pathogenesis of fungi by identifying and studying their virulence factors and in particular their effector proteins
• study the susceptibility of plants to fungal diseases by determining the plant molecules and cellular pathways targeted by fungal effectors
• deepen our knowledge of the plant immune system by studying NLR-type immune receptors

Our main biological model is blast disease caused by the ascomycete fungus Pyricularia oryzae (also called Magnaporthe oryzae) which causes immense losses on rice and wheat crops and which is a leading model for understanding fungal diseases in plants. Thus, we address fundamental questions in molecular plant pathology and produce knowledge for the control of one of the most damaging diseases for world agriculture.

Scale of study

Molecules, cells, genomes and whole organisms