Round Table Seminar: Pascal Schlapfer, Rhee Lab - Carnegie Institution - Plant Department, Using large scale models to predict the metabolic relationship between plants and parasites.

Plant pathogens such as the oomycetes Phytophtora sp. threaten human nutrition. Despite the advances in research to fight these pathogens - also based on genome sequence information - the metabolism of these pathogens is often not well understood. Beside the prediction of possible enzymatic reactions based on the genome, the prediction of interactions - the exchanged metabolites between the organism and different environments (e.g. soil vs. host) - are important. In order to understand the interaction of microorganisms with distinct environments, they are usually grown in culture. However, many of these pathogens cannot be cultured without host, and thus the environment cannot easily be changed. To still learn about pathogenic metabolism, we want to use large scale constraint based metabolic models of plant hosts and their pathogens to ask how different lifestyles such as obligate biotrophy and non-obligate biotrophy affected the metabolic toolboxes of the pathogens. We will then simulate metabolism of various host and pathogen interactions to predict how different species could use their tools, to increase their fitness in the different environments. A better understanding of the relationships of organisms would not only benefit our continuous fight against pathogen pressure on the field. It will eventually help us to understand metabolic relationships of different organisms in general.