Biology Seminar | Dr. Jennifer Lewis, Plant and Microbial Biology, University of CA, Berkeley | Diversifying pathogen recognition

Pathogens cause substantial crop losses of ~$220B worldwide every year. Genetic resistance is a powerful tool to protect plants from infection. Resistance can be rationally designed and/or identified from wild relatives of crop plants. I will discuss our work to rationally design resistance through a highly conserved angiosperm immune receptor ZAR1, which is a bacterial pathogen recognition hub, as well as our efforts to take advantage of natural diversity in disease resistance in wild relatives of tomato.