Foliar and fruit fungal pathogens challenge global food security, but how they optimize growth and development during infection is understudied. Little is known about the genetic underpinnings governing pathogen adaptation to host-derived nutrients. Homologs of common global and pathway-specific gene regulatory elements are likely to be involved, but their contribution to pathogenicity, and how they are connected to broader genetic networks, is largely unspecified.
In this workshop we will analyze the contribution of carbon and nitrogen metabolism in foliar and fruit pathogens and consider what is known, and what is not known, about fungal exploitation of host nutrients. Looking at several crop-fungal pathosystems, we will address the question of how common metabolic regulators have been co-opted to the plant-pathogenic lifestyle.
The workshop will also serve as forum to propose new approaches for disease control, based on our newly-acquired understanding of how nutrient-derived signals and regulatory pathways are utilized by the pathogen to drive infection.
We expect that these discussions will create a dialog between fungal molecular geneticists and agriculturally-oriented plant pathologists as a basis for development of new approaches for handling diseases in plant and fruits.