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Introduction
David Turrà currently works at the Department of Agriculture, University of Naples (Italy). David does research in Molecular Biology, Microbiology and Biotechnology. His current project is 'Chemotropic sensing of host plant signals'.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
December 2018 - present
February 2009 - December 2018
Publications
Publications (68)
Phytopathogenic fungi have evolved an amazing diversity of infection modes and nutritional strategies, yet the signaling pathways that govern pathogenicity are remarkably conserved. Protein kinases (PKs) catalyze the reversible phosphorylation of proteins, regulating a variety of cellular processes. Here, we present an overview of our current under...
For more than a century, fungal pathogens and symbionts have been known to orient hyphal growth towards chemical stimuli from the host plant. However, the nature of the plant signals as well as the mechanisms underlying the chemotropic response have remained elusive. Here we show that directed growth of the soil-inhabiting plant pathogen Fusarium o...
Plant infections caused by fungi are often associated with an increase in the pH of the surrounding host tissue. Extracellular alkalinization is thought to contribute to fungal pathogenesis, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Here, we show that the root-infecting fungus Fusarium oxysporum uses a functional homologue of the plant r...
Autocrine self-signalling via secreted peptides and cognate receptors regulates cell development in eukaryotes and is conserved from protozoans to mammals1,2. In contrast, secreted peptides from higher fungi have been traditionally associated with paracrine non-self-signalling during sexual reproduction3. For example, cells of the model fungus Sacc...
Soil-inhabiting fungal pathogens use chemical signals released by roots to direct hyphal growth towards the host plant. Whether other soil microorganisms exploit this capacity for their own benefit is currently unknown. Here we show that the endophytic rhizobacterium Rahnella aquatilis locates hyphae of the root-infecting fungal pathogen Fusarium o...
Soil-borne vascular pathogens pose serious threats to agriculture with complex invasion strategies that remain poorly characterized compared to foliar pathogens ¹ . While foliar pathogens like Magnaporthe oryzae employ specialized appressoria to penetrate plant surfaces through a combination of mechanical force and enzymatic degradation ² , the inv...
Background
The efficacy of biocontrol agents depends critically on their environmental adaptability, with nutrient availability being a key determinant of their success. In Trichoderma species, the mechanisms linking nutrient sensing to physiological responses remain poorly understood, despite their importance for biocontrol applications.
Results...
Beauveria bassiana (Bb) is a widespread entomopathogenic fungus widely used in agriculture for crop protection. Other than pest control, fungi belonging to the B. bassiana complex represent an important microbial resource in agroecosystems, considering their multiple interactions with other microorganisms as antagonists of phytopathogens, or with p...
Fusaric acid (Fa), a picolinic acid derivative, is a natural substance produced by a wide variety of fungal plant pathogens belonging to the Fusarium genus. as a metabolite, fusaric acid exerts several biological activities including metal chelation, electrolyte leakage, repression of atp synthesis, and direct toxicity on plants, animals and bacter...
Fusaric acid (FA), a picolinic acid derivative, is a natural substance produced by a wide variety of fungal plant pathogens belonging to the Fusarium genus. As a metabolite, fusaric acid exerts several biological activities including metal chelation, electrolyte leakage, repression of ATP synthesis, and direct toxicity on plants, animals and b acte...
Over the past decade, Halyomorpha halys has become one of the main threats to hazelnut production. Its trophic activity makes kernels inedible due to strongly detrimental effects on the organoleptic quality. Its management in Italy is still tricky due to the lack of effective native biocontrol agents and authorized and effective insecticides. A fie...
Fungal phytopathogens induce a variety of pathogenicity symptoms on their hosts. The soilborne vascular wilt pathogen Fusarium oxysporum infects roots of more than 150 different crop species. Initial colonization stages are asymptomatic, likely representing a biotrophic phase of infection, followed by a necrotrophic switch after vascular colonizati...
Mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) regulate a variety of cellular processes in eukaryotes. In fungal pathogens, conserved MAPK pathways control key virulence functions such as infection-related development, invasive hyphal growth, or cell wall remodeling. Recent findings suggest that ambient pH acts as a key regulator of MAPK-mediated pathog...
Fusaric acid (FA) is one of the first secondary metabolites isolated from phytopathogenic fungi belonging to the genus Fusarium. This molecule exerts a toxic effect on plants, rhizobacteria, fungi and animals, and it plays a crucial role in both plant and animal pathogenesis. In plants, metal chelation by FA is considered one of the possible mechan...
Mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling pathways control fundamental aspects of growth and development in fungi. In the soil-inhabiting ascomycete Fusarium oxysporum, which causes vascular wilt disease in more than a hundred crops, the MAPKs Fmk1 and Mpk1 regulate an array of developmental and virulence-related processes. The downstream c...
In fungi, ambient pH acts as a key regulator of development and virulence. The vascular wilt pathogen Fusarium oxysporum uses host alkalinization to promote infection of plant hosts through activation of the invasive growth mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) Fmk1. The molecular events underlying pH-driven MAPK regulation are unknown. Using the...
Fungal interactions with plant roots, either beneficial or detrimental, have a crucial impact on agriculture and ecosystems. The cosmopolitan plant pathogen Fusarium oxysporum (Fo) provokes vascular wilts in more than a hundred different crops. Isolates of this fungus exhibit host-specific pathogenicity, which is conferred by lineage-specific Secre...
During an infection, a single or multispecies biofilm can develop. Infections caused by non-dermatophyte molds, such as Fusarium spp. and yeasts, such as Candida spp., are particularly difficult to treat due to the formation of a mixed biofilm of the two species. Fusarium oxysporum is responsible for approximately 20% of human fusariosis, while Can...
Trichoderma spp. are among the most widely used plant beneficial fungi in agriculture. Its interaction with the plant triggers resistance responses by the activation of Induced Systemic Resistance mediated by Jasmonic acid and Ethylene and/or Systemic Acquired Resistance, which involves Salicylic acid, with the consequent control of a wide range of...
Beauveria bassiana (Bb) is a soil-borne entomopathogenic and endophytic fungus able to colonize plant roots and stems. In their interaction with plants, Endophytic Fungi (EF) may stimulate plant growth promotion and protection to both biotic and abiotic threats. EF isolates with crop production enhancement ability are thus increasingly sought for t...
Trichoderma spp. are among the most widely used plant beneficial fungi in agriculture. A novel approach to enhance their effectiveness in plant defense is to use the fungi in combination with bioactive molecules including plant-derived compounds. Here, we show that plant treatment with Trichoderma afroharzianum (strain T22) and Systemin (Sys), a to...
Herein we designed three novel fluorescent brightening agents based on a benzodifuran skeleton. The compounds are colorless fluorophores emitting in the blue region with an improved water solubility and ability to interact with living cells. A complete understanding of the emission mechanisms was achieved by Density Functional Theory study based on...
Endophytic fungi (EF) can enhance both plant growth and defense barriers against pests and pathogens, contributing to the reduction of chemical pesticides and fertilizers use in agriculture. Beauveria bassiana is an entomopathogenic fungus showing endophytism in several crops, often associated with a good capacity to limit the development of pests...
Fungal interactions with plant roots, either beneficial or detrimental, have a major impact on agriculture and ecosystems. The soil inhabiting ascomycete Fusarium oxysporum (Fo) constitutes a species complex of worldwide distribution causing vascular wilt in more than a hundred different crops. Individual isolates of the fungus exhibit host-specifi...
Purpose
Grass pea is a legume species with recognized resistance to several diseases and thus important for the improvement of related major legume crops. It is infected by the soil-borne fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. pisi (Fop), known as causal agent of pea fusarium wilt. We aim to identify, among grass pea, new sources of resistance against Fo...
Current knowledge on the mechanism of strigolactones (SLs) as signaling molecules during specific interactions in the rhizosphere is mainly related to the control of germination of parasitic weed seeds and hyphal branching of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Thus, the role of plant secreted SLs in regulating the growth and development of root-colonizi...
Fungal metabolism and enzyme production are regulated by nutrient availability and by interactions with the living environment. We investigated the mechanisms underpinning adaptation of the biotechnological fungus Trichoderma reesei to decaying plant biomass versus living plants. We found that concentration-gated response to glucose, the main molec...
Trichoderma atroviride is a mycoparasitic fungus used as biological control agent to protect plants against fungal pathogens. Successful biocontrol is based on the perception of signals derived from both the plant symbiont and the fungal prey. Here, we applied three different chemotropic assays to study the chemosensing capacity of T. atroviride to...
Fusarium oxysporum is a highly destructive plant pathogen and an emerging pathogen of humans. Like other ascomycete fungi, F. oxysporum secretes α-pheromone, a small peptide that functions both as a chemoattractant and as a quorum-sensing signal. Three of the ten amino acid residues of α-pheromone are tryptophan, an amino acid whose sidechain has h...
Kunitz-type (PKPI) and Potato type I (Pin1) protease inhibitors (PIs) are two families of serine proteinase inhibitors often associated to plant storage organs and with well known insecticidal and nematicidal activities. Noteworthy, their ability to limit fungal and bacterial pathogenesis in vivo or to influence plant physiology has not been invest...
Super-resolution microscopy has evolved as a powerful method for subdiffraction-resolution fluorescence imaging of cells and cellular organelles, but requires sophisticated and expensive installations. Expansion microscopy (ExM), which is based on the physical expansion of the cellular structure of interest, provides a cheap alternative to bypass t...
Fusarium oxysporum is a cross-kingdom fungal pathogen that infects plants and humans. Horizontally transferred lineage-specific (LS) chromosomes were reported to determine host-specific pathogenicity among phytopathogenic F. oxysporum. However, the existence and functional importance of LS chromosomes among human pathogenic isolates are unknown. He...
Soil‐inhabiting fungal pathogens use chemical signals to locate and colonise the host plant. In the vascular wilt fungus Fusarium oxysporum, hyphal chemotropism towards tomato roots is triggered by secreted plant peroxidases (Prx), which catalyse the reductive cleavage of reactive oxygen species (ROS).
Here we show that this chemotropic response re...
Verticillium wilts caused by Verticillium spp. are among the most challenging plant diseases to control and affect numerous hosts worldwide. Due to the lack of effective, conventional control methods, integrated control strategies provide a promising approach to manage these diseases. The non-pathogenic Fusarium oxysporum strain FO12 was reported i...
Plant roots release complex mixtures of bioactive molecules including compounds that affect the activity and modify the composition of the rhizosphere microbiome. In this work, we investigated the initial phase of the interaction between tomato and an effective biocontrol strain of Trichoderma harzianum (T22). We found that root exudates (RE), obta...
Host root‐derived signals trigger the germination of seeds of obligate root parasitic weeds. Among these, strigolactones (SLs), a class of plant hormones, are the major natural germination stimulants in the rhizosphere. The early growth stages of parasitic plant development – such as seed germination, host attachment, and tubercle development – are...
During sexual development, ascomycete fungi produce two types of peptide pheromones termed a and α. The α pheromone from the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a thirteen residue peptide which elicits cell cycle arrest and chemotropic growth, has served as paradigm for the interaction of small peptides with their cognate G protein-coupled rece...
Mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascades mediate cellular responses to environmental signals. Previous studies in the fungal pathogen Fusarium oxysporum revealed a crucial role of Fmk1, the MAPK orthologous to Saccharomyces cerevisiae Fus3/Kss1, in vegetative hyphal fusion and plant infection. Here we genetically dissected the individual an...
Nature Microbiology 1 , 16043 (2016); published 11 April 2016; corrected 9 May 2016. Following discussions regarding the details of the early experiments carried out for this Letter, it became clear that an additional author, Manuel S.
The maize pathogenic fungus Ustilago maydis experiences endoplasmic reticulum ( ER ) stress during plant colonization and relies on the unfolded protein response ( UPR ) to cope with this stress.
We identified the U. maydis co‐chaperone, designated Dnj1, as part of this conserved cellular response to ER stress. ∆ dnj1 cells are sensitive to the ER...
As the use of RNA-seq has popularized, there is an increasing consciousness of the importance of experimental design, bias removal, accurate quantification and control of false positives for proper data analysis. We introduce the NOISeq R-package for quality control and analysis of count data. We show how the available diagnostic tools can be used...
Fungi belonging to the genus Trichoderma are among the most active and ecologically successful microbes found in natural environments, as they are able to use a variety of substrates and affect the growth of other microbes and virtually any plant species. We isolated and characterized a novel type II hydrophobin secreted by the biocontrol strain MK...
In plants, innate immune responses are initiated by plasma membrane-located pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) upon recognition of elicitors, including exogenous pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) and endogenous damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs). Arabidopsis thaliana produces more than 1000 secreted peptide candidates, but...
Soilborne fungal pathogens are highly persistent and provoke important crop losses. During saprophytic and infectious stages in the soil, these organisms face situations of nutrient limitation and lack of essential elements, such as iron. We investigated the role of the bZIP transcription factor HapX as a central regulator of iron homeostasis and v...
Soilborne fungal pathogens cause devastating yield losses and are highly persistent and difficult to control. During the infection process, these organisms must cope with limited availability of iron. Here we show that the bZIP protein HapX functions as a key regulator of iron homeostasis and virulence in the vascular wilt fungus Fusarium oxysporum...
Serine protease inhibitors (PIs) are a large and complex group of plant proteins. Members of the potato type I (Pin1) and II (Pin2) proteinase inhibitor families are among the first and most extensively characterized plant PIs. Many insects and phytopathogenic microorganisms use intracellular and extracellular serine proteases playing important rol...
Protease inhibitors (PIs) are small ubiquitous proteins with a variety of biological functions in plants, including protein stabilization, modulation of apoptosis and defense against pathogens. Kunitz-like inhibitors (PKPIs) and proteinase inhibitors 1 (PI-1) are abundant in storage organs of potato plants and are up-regulated in other tissues in r...
Successful biocontrol interactions often require that the beneficial microbes involved are resistant or tolerant to a variety of toxicants, including antibiotics produced by themselves or phytopathogens, plant antimicrobial compounds, and synthetic chemicals or contaminants. The ability of Trichoderma spp., the most widely applied biocontrol fungi,...
Trichoderma harzianum T22 is one of the Trichoderma isolates most used as active ingredient in commercial bio-fungicides and bio-fertilizers. In addition to their mycoparasitic abilities, many Trichoderma strains can colonize and grow in association with plant roots and can significantly increase plant growth, development
and systemic resistance to...
Trichoderma-based biofungicides are a reality in agriculture, with more than 50 formulations available today as registered products worldwide. Several strategies have been applied to identify the main genes and compounds involved in this complex cross-talk between the fungal antagonist and the microbial pathogen, as mediated by the plant. Proteome...
The main molecular factors involved in the complex interactions occurring between plants (bean), two different fungal pathogens (Botrytis cinerea, Rhizoctonia solani) and an antagonistic strain of the genus Trichoderma were investigated. Two-dimensional (2-D) electrophoresis was used to analyze separately collected proteomes from each single, two-...
Different tissues of potato, tobacco, and bean plants were screened for anti-fungal protease inhibitor (PI) activity, also following fungal pathogen inoculation or mechanical wounding. A potato (Solanum tuberosum var. Desireé) sprout protein extract showed a strong inhibitory activity against chymotrypsin and Botrytis cinerea fungal proteases, but...
