Heribert Hirt
King Abdullah University of Sciences and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia and Institute of Plant Sciences of Paris Saclay, France
http://cda.kaust.edu.sa/Pages/Home.aspx
E-mail: heribert.hirt@kaust.edu.sa
Plants are permanently challenged by a number of adverse environmental factors including a large variety of microbes and the innate immune system revealed to play a key role in regulating plant growth and defence.
Apart from studying typical plant pathogens, such as Pseudomonas syringae, we are interested in extreme cases of plant-microbe interactions, such as Salmonella typhimurium, one of the major causes of food poisoning and death in humans. S. typhimurium is often found in soil samples and can infect and propagate both in animals and plants1. S. typhimurium was found to apply a plethora of strategies to infect plants some of which are specific to plants and other are equally used to suppress the human innate immune system2.
When bacterial pathogens infect plant leaves they enter through stomata. In contrast to abiotic signals, which are mediated by ABA, we found that stomata have developed a largely independent signalling system for pathogen detection3,4.
However, soil also hosts and study rhizosphere microbes from plants living in different deserts of the world that enable plants to survive under extreme conditions (http://www.darwin21.net)5. We established different screening protocols for testing the microbial capacity to transfer stress tolerance to crop plants and try to understand the underlying molecular mechanisms for developing new concepts of sustainable agriculture in arid regions of the world.
References:
1. Tyler HL, Triplett EW (2008) Plants as a habitat for beneficial and/or human pathogenic bacteria. Ann. Rev. Phytopathol. 46, 53-73.
2. García AV, Hirt H (2014) Salmonella enterica induces and subverts the plant immune system. Front Microbiol. 5:141
3. Montillet JL, Leonhardt N, Mondy S, Tranchimand S, Rumeau D, Boudsocq M, Garcia AV, Douki T, Bigeard J, Laurière C, Chevalier A, Castresana C, Hirt H (2013) An abscisic acid-independent oxylipin pathway controls stomatal closure and immune defense in Arabidopsis. PLoS Biol 3:e1001513
4. Montillet JL, Hirt H (2013) New checkpoints in stomatal defense. Trends Plant Sci. 6:295-7.
5. de Zelicourt A, Al-Yousif M, Hirt H (2013) Rhizosphere microbes as essential partners for plant stress tolerance. Mol. Plant. 6:242-245.