The project aims to identify chemical signals that are exchanged between V. longisporum and A. thaliana and to elucidate their function. The project will be divided into two parts: The first part is based on our previous observation that the aerial parts of infected Arabidopsis plants accumulate metabolites that may be involved in the biosynthesis of cutina and suberin. They derive from the phenylpropanoid pathway and from the biosynthesis of very long chain fatty acids. We aim to focus now on the function of these metabolic changes. Cinnamic acid derivatives will be analyzed as a representative group of the phenylpropanoids and very long chain fatty acids as the other group that either may be involved in cutin or suberin formation or in sphingolipid-derived signalling. The second part is derived from the observation that we identified numerous metabolites unknown for plants in the aerial parts of infected Arabidopsis plants leading to the hypothesis that - from early stages of infection on - fungal metabolites may circulate throughout the whole plant. We aim to identify these metabolites by comparing metabolite profiles from whole fungal mycelium grown under different conditions with and without xylem sap with those obtained from infected and non-infected aerial parts of plants. Identified candidates originating from the fungus will be tested whether they are capable of inducing expression of recently identified Verticillium longisporum induced genes. Certain phenylpropanoids and very long chain fatty acid derivatives will be tested for inducing any changes in the fungal transcriptome and proteome. (for the german version click here)

Mareike Possienke, Stefanie Goetze

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