Project title
Prediction of Effector-R genes interactions in the chickpea-ascochyta pathosystem
Collaborators and funding
This project is part of a GRDC funded project (GRI2407-001RTX) to investigate and characterise Ascochyta rabiei of chickpea. It is a collaboration between Griffith University and the Centre for Crop Disease Management (CCDM) at Curtin University. The structural protein analysis is performed in collaboration with Thomas Litfin at the University of NSW.
Contact(s)
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Ido Bar, Griffith University, i.bar@griffith.edu.au
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Thomas Litfin, University of NSW, t.litfin@unsw.edu.au
Project description and aims
This project aims to identify candidate chickpea defense response (R) genes that interact with effector proteins secreted by Ascochyta rabiei, a fungal pathogen causing the chickpea Ascochyta blight disease. This work will be based on current knowledge of A. rabiei effectors, which includes several candidates identified by the teams at Griffith University and the CCDM through dual host-pathogen RNA-Seq, gene knockouts and mapping populations and QTL analyses. The candidate effectors will be screened in a 1:many style against ~5,000 chickpea proteins that were shortlisted as potential defense response genes. The analysis will be performed using dedicated NextFlow version of an AlphaPulldown-style workflow (wisps), which was developed (and deployed) to run on the NCI HPC. Identifying those defense response genes will contribute to our knowledge of how chickpea plants respond to ascochyta blight infection and will provide targets for breeding new chickpea cultivars with improved resistance to ascochyta blight disease.
How is ABLeS supporting this work?
This work is supported through the Production Bioinformatics scheme provided by ABLeS. The support includes storage and compute allocation.
Expected outputs enabled by participation in ABLeS
The expected outputs are lists of candidate chickpea defense response genes for each Ascochyta effector gene. These will be included in publications that are currently prepared and will be deposited in open access repositories.
These details have been provided by project members at project initiation. For more information on the project, please consult the contact(s) or project links above.