Paulo José P.L. Teixeira, Ph.D.

Research

Crop diseases caused by pathogens constitute one of the most challenging problems in agriculture, leading to significant economic losses each year. Given the threat of emerging plant diseases and the continuous growth of the human population, improving our understanding of plant-microbe interactions is essential for global food security. My research focused on the plant immune system and its interactions with both pathogenic and commensal microorganisms. In particular, I investigated how pathogen virulence factors manipulate host signaling pathways to promote susceptibility and disease, as well as how commensal members of the root microbiome suppress plant immune responses during root colonization. Using genetic analyses and high-throughput approaches, including RNA sequencing and ChIP sequencing, I studied the molecular networks underlying these interactions and their impacts on plant health and disease outcomes. This work contributed to a broader understanding of the mechanisms by which pathogenic and commensal microorganisms modulate plant immunity and shape plant-microbe interactions.

Partnership Award

With the Partnership Award, Paulo José P. L. Teixeira, Ph.D., and Antonio Camargo, Ph.D., will team up to study plant immune receptor specificity. Plants harbor an enormous and largely unexplored repertoire of immune receptors, which are critical in defending against pathogens. In most cases, however, it is not known which pathogen-derived proteins, or effectors, activate which receptors. This limits the ability to engineer disease-resistant cultivars of agriculturally important plants. This project pairs Teixeira’s expertise in plant immunity with Camargo’s background in computational biology and evolution. They will establish a platform to explore the natural diversity of a group of immune receptors called nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeats (NLRs) and to identify putative novel receptor-effector pairs. They will use this platform to screen a large selection of plant species for NLRs that respond to two effectors of Xanthomonas bacteria, which cause a range of plant diseases, and validate the predictions experimentally in the model plant Nicotiana benthamiana.