Macroevolutionary Dissection of Infection and Immunity in Land Plants

The colonization of land by plants required the evolution of molecular machinery able to perceive and respond to a wide array of microbial threats. While this paradigm is extensively explored in the evolutionarily young angiosperm lineage (flowering plants), our current understanding of plant-microbe interactions in divergent non-flowering lineages is extremely limited.

Our research aims to understand the origin, evolution, and functional diversity of immune processes that protect plants from microbial infection. In addition, we aim to decipher key pathogen virulence mechanisms that subvert plant immunity to achieve disease. To accomplish this, we exploit broad host range pathogens (Pseudomonas syringae and Phytophthora palmivora) to interrogate the immune systems of distantly related land plants, from non-vascular bryophytes to flowering seed plants. In this lecture, I will describe our recent efforts to understand how the bacterial pathogen P. syringae infects diverse and distantly related land plants while also describing emerging data on the broad functional conservation of plant immune receptors.