Gerhard Braus & Cara Haney
PhD student: Alexandra Nagel

The interaction of the bacterial plant root microbiome and Verticillium wildtype as well as mutant strains deficient in signal transduction pathways or deficient in initial steps of plant root infection will be examined. Mutual responses of fungus bacteria and plants will be monitored. The bacterial impact on wildtype or mutant fungal responses in growth, development and bacterial biocontrol will be compared to changes in fungal transcriptomes, secretomes and the production of secondary metabolites. Analysed bacteria include Bacillus (Hollensteiner et al., Front Microbiol. 2017) and Pseudomonas ssp. (Nesemann et al., AMB, 2018)] and the rhizosphere bacteria of Prof. Cara Haney (UBC) as Canadian partner.