Ivo Feußner & Yuelin Zhang
PhD student: Lennart Mohnike

Systemic acquired resistance (SAR) is an evolutionarily conserved defense mechanism induced in the distal parts of plants after a locally restricted primary infection (Fu and Dong, 2013). It confers long-lasting protection against a broad spectrum of microbial pathogens. Salicylic acid (SA) and pipecolic acid (Pip) function as a signal molecules in SAR as well as in local defense responses.
Starting point of the proposed research project was the working hypothesis that the function of genes of unknown function can be identified by metabolomic approaches that will lead to the identification of new metabolites that regulate SAR independent from SA (Ding et al., 2016).
During the course of this project, we will analyze autoimmune mutants by metabolite fingerprinting using the MarVis workflow (Kaever et al., 2015; König et al., 2014). The basis of this approach will be the hypothesis that mutated genes encode enzymes that are involved in the synthesis of metabolites that regulate SAR and that the substrates of these enzymes accumulate in the respective mutant background upon pathogen infection.