How to build an immune receptor: AI-led protein design for engineering disease resistance (BANFIELD_J27DTP)

Like animals, plants get sick, but they have an immune system to fight back against infection. Plant diseases are a threat to food production and a constraint on achieving food security against the background of a changing climate and the need to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

Understanding how components of the plant immune system (e.g. evolved plant immune receptors) work to detect and respond to pathogens, and how they can be engineered, offers new opportunities to protecting crops and secure higher yielding harvests in a sustainable way. However, emerging computational protein design tools enable “bottom-up” approaches to develop de novo new-to-nature immune receptors with tailored functions, offering exciting potential in agriculture against a range of important diseases.

This project will investigate how to computationally build and combine recognition-switch-execute modules to recognise pathogen molecules, turn the receptor “on” and elicit a cellular response, which in a host-pathogen infection situation would prevent disease. The project will investigate the molecular mechanisms of how these receptors work using both in vitro and in vivo approaches and explore how they can be deployed to manage plant diseases. The studentship spans interdisciplinary techniques including computational protein design, molecular biology, biochemistry, structural biology, in planta assays, and plant pathology. There will opportunities to work with leading national and international collaborators.

The student will receive expert training in diverse disciplines on a strategically relevant topic, within a stimulating research environment. They will join a team of researchers with shared interests and have access to world-class facilities. Further, it is expected they will attend national/international conferences to present their research.