Mining fungal effector candidates in biotrophic plant pathogens; rusts and mildews


Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Bilgisayar Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2012

Öğrenci: SİNAN UĞUR UMU

Danışman: TOLGA CAN

Özet:

Biotrophic plant pathogens lead to huge crop losses and they have great economical drawbacks on wheat and barley production. These pathogens rely on formation of haustoria and transfer of effector proteins into the host cells for generating disease. The main role of effector proteins is to disable plant defense mechanisms. Effector proteins contain N-terminal signal peptides and they have little sequence similarity between each other. It is vital to detect as many effector proteins as possible to understand infection and disease formation processes of biotrophic plant pathogens. To this end, sequencing of pathogen genomes are being emerged, the data will be invaluable for identifying the candidate effectors in terms of biological and biochemical roles in infection and more. There are some bioinformatics based methods available that can be utilized to classify and distinguish effectors from other pathogenic genes. It is important to understand how candidate effectors can be searched from Expressed Sequence Tags or transcriptome sequences. Hereby, our attempt is to present a pipeline in establishing a methodology. As a consequence, here we propose new candidate effectors. In plant-pathogen interactions also miRNAs are too proving to be an important factor which cannot be neglected. During disease infection, expression levels of miRNAs are varying which in turn may be a proof of miRNA regulation of pathogen genes. Therefore, cross-kingdom RNA interference may take place between plant and pathogen. We have tested plant pathogens for possible plant miRNA availability and found their most likely targets with in the pathogen genes.