
Ulrich SchaffrathRWTH Aachen University · Institute of Plant Physiology (Bio III)
Ulrich Schaffrath
apl. Prof. Dr. habil.
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162
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
January 1998 - present
April 1997 - December 1997
May 1995 - March 1997
Publications
Publications (162)
Phakopsora pachyrhizi , an obligate biotrophic rust fungus, is the causal agent of Asian Soybean Rust (ASR) disease. Here, we utilized whole-genome data to explore the evolutionary patterns and population structure across 45 P. pachyrhizi isolates collected from 1972 to 2017 from diverse geographic regions worldwide. We also characterized in-silico...
Reverse genetic approaches are common tools in genomics for elucidating gene func-tions, involving techniques such as gene deletion followed by screening for aberrant phenotypes. If the generation of gene deletion mutants fails, the question arises whether the failure stems from technical issues or because the gene of interest (GOI) is essential, m...
Myrtle rust, caused by Austropuccinia psidii, has been associated with more than 480 plant species belonging to the family Myrtaceae. Intraspecific variability in pathogenicity has been reported among isolates of A. psidii from different hosts. However, there are few studies that have comparatively quantified the disease in guava (Psidium guajava)...
Phosphate availability modulates plant immune function and regulates interactions with beneficial, phosphate-providing, microbes. Here, we describe the hijacking of plant phosphate sensing by a family of Nudix hydrolase effectors from pathogenic Magnaporthe oryzae and Colletotrichum fungi. Structural and enzymatic analyses of the Nudix effector fam...
With >7000 species the order of rust fungi has a disproportionately large impact on agriculture, horticulture, forestry and foreign ecosystems. The infectious spores are typically dikaryotic, a feature unique to fungi in which two haploid nuclei reside in the same cell. A key example is Phakopsora pachyrhizi, the causal agent of Asian soybean rust...
MonocotJRLs are Poaceae-specific two-domain proteins that consist of a jacalin-related lectin (JRL) and a dirigent (DIR) domain which participate in multiple developmental processes, including disease resistance. For OsJAC1, a monocotJRL from rice, it has been confirmed that constitutive expression in transgenic rice or barley plants facilitates br...
Pesticides are routinely used to prevent severe losses in agriculture. This practice is under debate because of its potential negative environmental impact and selection of resistances in pathogens. Therefore, the development of disease resistant plants is mandatory. It was shown that the rice (Oryza sativa) protein OsJAC1 enhances resistance again...
In the evolution of land plants, the plant immune system has experienced expansion in immune receptor and signaling pathways. Lineage-specific expansions have been observed in diverse gene families that are potentially involved in immunity but lack causal association. Here, we show that Rps8 -mediated resistance in barley to the pathogen Puccinia s...
Asian soybean rust, caused by Phakopsora pachyrhizi, is one of the world's most economically damaging agricultural diseases. Despite P. pachyrhizi's impact, the exceptional size and complexity of its genome prevented generation of an accurate genome assembly. We simultaneously sequenced three P. pachyrhizi genomes uncovering a genome up to 1.25 Gb...
Magnaporthe oryzae secretes several effectors that modulate and hijack rice processes to colonize host cells, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We report on a novel cytoplasmic effector MoIug4 that targets the rice ethylene pathway as a transcription repressor to subvert host immunity.
We found that MoIug4 binds to the promoter of the h...
Black root rot is a disease of the strawberry with increasing importance for Germany. Until the early years of the twenty-first century, very different pathogens, including fungi and nematodes, were thought to cause this disease. However, based on substantial research between 2007 and 2014 at the fruit-growing center Jork (Esteburg, Germany) fungi...
Phytopathogenic fungi are known to secrete specific proteins which act as virulence factors and promote host colonization. Some of them are enzymes with plant cell wall degradation capability, like pectate lyases (Pls). In this work, we examined the involvement of Pls in the infection process of Magnaporthe oryzae, the causal agent of rice blast di...
In the evolution of land plants, the plant immune system has experienced expansion in immune receptor and signaling pathways. Lineage-specific expansions have been observed in diverse gene families that are potentially involved in immunity, but lack causal association. Here, we show that Rps8-mediated resistance in barley to the fungal pathogen Puc...
Magnaporthe oryzae is one of the most economically important phytopathogenic fungi, and is used as a model organism to study plant-pathogen interactions. To unravel the infection process, forward and reverse genetic approaches are essential, but are often hindered by the lack of a straightforward selection procedure for transformants. Here we repor...
Background
Growing large crop monocultures and heavily using pesticides enhances the evolution of pesticide-insensitive pests and pathogens. To reduce pesticide use in crop cultivation, the application of priming-active compounds (PrimACs) is a welcome alternative. PrimACs strengthen the plant immune system and could thus help to protect plants wit...
The monocot chimeric jacalin OsJAC1 from Oryza sativa consists of a dirigent and a jacalin-related lectin domain. The corresponding gene is expressed in response to different abiotic and biotic stimuli. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the basic function of the individual domains and their contribution to the physiological role of the en...
Protein crop plants such as soybean and lupin are attracting increasing attention because of their potential use as forage, green manure, or for the production of oil and protein for human consumption. Whereas soybean production only recently gained more importance in Germany and within the whole EU in frame of protein strategies, lupin production...
Interaction studies of OsJAC1 with differential scanning fluorimetry, hemagglutination assay and near-UV circular dichroism spectroscopy.
Wheat blast caused by Magnaporthe oryzae pathotype Triticum (MoT), initially restricted to South America, is a global threat for wheat after spreading to Asia in 2016 by the introduction of contaminated seeds, raising the question about transmission of the pathogen from seeds to seedlings, a process so far not well understood. So, we studied the re...
Background Growing large crop monocultures and heavily using pesticides enhances the chance of evolution of pesticide-insensitive pests and pathogens. To reduce pesticide use in crop cultivation, the application of priming-active compounds (PrimACs) is a welcome alternative. PrimACs strengthen the plant immune system and can thus help to protect pl...
Wheat blast caused by Magnaporthe oryzae pv. Triticum is an upcoming threat to wheat cultivation worldwide. The disease crossing over to wheat first gained attention in South America, with increasing interest coming from its more recent appearance in the big wheat-growing areas of Asia. The increasing economic relevance of the disease and the lack...
CRISPR/Cas has become the state-of-the-art technology for genetic manipulation in diverse organisms, enabling targeted genetic changes to be performed with unprecedented efficiency. Here we report on the first establishment of robust CRISPR/Cas editing in the important necrotrophic plant pathogen Botrytis cinerea based on the introduction of optimi...
Soybean (Glycine max [L.] Merr.) is economically the most important protein crop grown worldwide. However, Europe largely depends on soybean imported from the Americas (European Commission 2019; Haupt and Schmid 2020). In Germany, soybean production was not formally recorded before 2016, but since then a steady increase along with an expansion of t...
Recent work has provided evidence for the occurrence of N-hydroxypipecolic acid (NHP) in Arabidopsis thaliana, characterized its pathogen-inducible biosynthesis by a three-step metabolic sequence from l-lysine, and established a central role for NHP in the regulation of systemic acquired resistance. Here, we show that NHP is biosynthesized in sever...
Protein crop plants such as soybean and lupin attract increasing attention because of their potential use as forage, green manure or for the production of oil and protein for human consumption. While soybean production only recently gained more importance in Germany and within the whole EU in frame of protein strategies, lupin production already is...
Wheat blast caused by Magnaporthe oryzae pv. Triticum (MoT) is an upcoming threat to wheat cultivation worldwide. The disease crossing over to wheat first gained attention in South America, with increasing interest coming from its more recent appearance in the big wheat growing areas of Asia. The increasing economic relevance of the disease and the...
Barley mlo mutants are well known for their profound resistance against powdery mildew disease. Recently, mlo mutant plants were generated in hexaploid bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) with the help of transgenic (transcription-activator-like nuclease, TALEN) and non-transgenic (targeted induced local lesions in genomes, TILLING) biotechnological ap...
Powdery mildews are obligate biotrophic fungal pathogens causing important diseases of plants worldwide. Very little is known about the requirements for their pathogenicity at the molecular level. This is largely due to the inability to culture these organisms in vitro or to modify them genetically. Here we describe a mutagenesis procedure based on...
Barley mlo mutants are well known for their profound resistance against powdery mildew disease. Recently, mlo mutant plants were generated in hexaploid bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) with the help of transgenic (transcription-activator-like nuclease, TALEN) and non-transgenic (targeted induced local lesions in genomes, TILLING) biotechnological ap...
CRISPR/Cas has become the state-of-the-art technology for genetic manipulation in diverse organisms, enabling targeted genetic changes to be performed with unprecedented efficiency. Here we report on the first establishment of robust CRISPR/Cas editing in the important necrotrophic plant pathogen Botrytis cinerea based on the introduction of optimi...
Phakopsora meliosmae‐myrianthae, the causal agent of Asian grapevine leaf rust, significantly reduces the photosynthetic efficiency of grapevine leaves in green symptomless tissues surrounding lesions. We took a close look at grapevine leaves colonisation kinetics by P. meliosmae‐myrianthae and compared it to P. pachyrhizi‐soybean and to Uromyces a...
The cuticle coats the primary aerial surfaces of land plants. It consists of cutin and waxes, which provide protection against desiccation, pathogens, and herbivores. Acyl cuticular waxes are synthesized via elongase complexes that extend fatty acyl precursors up to 38 carbons for downstream modification pathways. The leaves of 21 barley eceriferum...
Background
Nonhost resistance (NHR) protects plants against a vast number of non-adapted pathogens which implicates a potential exploitation as source for novel disease resistance strategies. Aiming at a fundamental understanding of NHR a global analysis of transcriptome reprogramming in the economically important Triticeae cereals wheat and barley...
Loss of function of barley Mlo confers durable broad-spectrum penetration resistance to the barley powdery mildew pathogen , Blumeria graminis f. sp. hordei ( Bgh ). Given the importance of mlo mutants in agriculture, surprisingly few molecular components have been identified to be required for this type of resistance in barley. With the aim to ide...
Plant lectins are proteins that reversibly bind carbohydrates and are assumed to play an important role in plant development and resistance. Through the binding of carbohydrate ligands, lectins are involved in the perception of environmental signals and their translation into phenotypical responses. These processes require down-stream signaling cas...
Anthropogenic influences such as tourism and climate change affect ecosystems. One consequence is that invasive species can spread to and colonize novel areas. A recent example of this scenario is the appearance in the early 2000s in Brazil and Australia of the plant pathogenic fungus Phakopsora euvitis which causes Asian grapevine leaf rust. It is...
Cover illustration related to the paper "Asian grapevine leaf rust caused by Phakopsora euvitis: an important disease in Brazil"
To prevent yield losses in plant cultivation due to plant pathogens, it is an important task to find new disease resistance mechanisms. Recently, Weidenbach et al. (2016) reported about the capacity of the rice gene OsJAC1 to enhance resistance in rice and barley against a broad spectrum of different pathogens. Here, we describe the respective prot...
We performed a growth inhibition assay to test antibacterial compounds in leaf extracts from transgenic rice plants. The assay is based on over-night co-incubation of a defined concentration of colony forming units (cfu) of the respective bacteria together with aqueous extracts of ground leaf tissue. Defense of plants against harmful organisms can...
Key message:
Adapted pathogens are able to modulate cell responses of their hosts most likely due to the activity of secreted effector molecules thereby enabling colonisation by ostensible nonhost pathogens. It is postulated that host and nonhost pathogens of a given plant species differ in their repertoire of secreted effector molecules that are...
Modular proteins are an evolutionary answer to optimize performance of proteins that physically interact with each other for functionality. Using a combination of genetic and biochemical experiments, we characterized the rice protein OsJAC1 which consists of a jacalin-related lectin (JRL) domain predicted to bind mannose-containing oligosaccharides...
The wheat gene Lr34 confers durable and partial field resistance against the obligate biotrophic, pathogenic rust fungi and powdery mildew in adult wheat plants. The resistant Lr34 allele evolved after wheat domestication through two gain-of-function mutations in an ATP-binding cassette transporter gene. An Lr34-like fungal disease resistance with...
Recombinant protein production using Escherichia coli as expression host is highly efficient, however, it also induces strong host cell metabolic burden. Energy and biomass precursors are withdrawn from the host’s metabolism as they are required for plasmid replication, heterologous gene expression and protein production. Rare codons in a heterolog...
Non-host resistance (NHR) is the resistance of plants to a plethora of non-adapted pathogens and is considered as one of the most robust resistance mechanisms of plants. Studies have shown that the efficiency of resistance in general and NHR in particular could vary in different plant organs, thus pointing to tissue-specific determinants. This was...
Aerial parts of plants are separated from the environment by a cuticle which functions in protection against desiccation and pathogen attack. Recently, we reported on a barley mutant with defect in the 3-KETOACYL-CoA-SYNTHASE (HvKCS6) gene, resulting in reduced coverage of the cuticle with epicuticular waxes. Spores of adapted and non-adapted powde...
Background
Plant hormones are well known regulators which balance plant responses to abiotic and biotic stresses. We investigated the role of abscisic acid (ABA) in resistance of barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) against the plant pathogenic fungus Magnaporthe oryzae.ResultsExogenous application of ABA prior to inoculation with M. oryzae led to more dise...
For plant pathogenic fungi such as powdery mildews, which survive only on a limited number of host plant species, it is a matter of vital importance that their spores sense that they landed on the right spot to initiate germination as quick as possible. We investigated a barley (Hordeum vulgare) mutant with reduced epicuticular leaf waxes on which...
Recent advances in the field of sequencing technologies and bioinformatics allow a more rapid access to genomes of non-model organisms at sinking costs. Accordingly, draft genomes of several economically important cereal rust fungi have been released in the last 3 years. Aside from the very recent flax rust and poplar rust draft assemblies there ar...
Mach–Zehnder false-colour micrograph showing germtube and appressorium of Phakopsora pachyrhizi (Asian soybean rust) with a developing penetration hypha.
Asian soybean rust ( Phakopsora pachyrhizi ) causes a devastating disease in soybean ( Glycine max ). We tested the hypothesis that the fungus generates high turgor pressure in its hyaline appressoria to mechanically pierce epidermal cells.
Turgor pressure was determined by a microscopic technique, called transmitted light double‐beam interference...
Head blast caused by the fungal plant pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae is an upcoming threat for wheat and barley cultivation. We investigated the nonhost response of barley to an isolate of the Magnaporthe species complex which is pathogenic on Pennisetum spp. as a potential source for novel resistance traits.
Array experiments identified a barley gene...
The ascomycete and causative agent of maize anthracnose and stem rot Colletotrichum graminicola differentiates melanized infection cells called appressoria that are indispensable for breaching the plant cell wall. High concentrations of osmolytes accumulate within the appressorium, and the internal turgor pressure of up to 5.4 MPa provides sufficie...
Nonhost resistance ( NHR ) of plants to fungal pathogens comprises different defense layers. Epidermal penetration resistance of Arabidopsis to Phakopsora pachyrhizi requires functional PEN 1 , PEN 2 and PEN 3 genes, whereas post‐invasion resistance in the mesophyll depends on the combined functionality of PEN 2 , PAD 4 and SAG 101 . Other genetic...