The team Mr. Valls leads has developed genetic tools to stably transform R. solanacearum, which have been essential to study the infection process in resistant and susceptible plants, to evaluate plant germplasm for resistance to bacterial wilt and to study the plant and bacterial transcriptomes. The team has established the main bottlenecks in resistant tomato that restrict R. solanacearum infection and have determined that ligno-suberin vascular coatings and, more precisely, tyramine-derived hydroxycinnamic acid amides are involved in pathogen restriction. The team has also determined four genetic programmes that are deployed by R. solanacearum to colonise plants,that the bacterial type III Secretion system is expressed throughout infection and have identified some plant targets of bacterial effector proteins. He has also contributed to the work led by NS Coll to characterise the process of plant cell death and the role played by metacaspases in it.
Accomplishments
