Thesis subject
Superorganisms: the co-evolution of plants and plant parasitic nematodes
Current agricultural measures against plant parasites focus mostly on the use of so-called resistant cultivars. These control populations of soil-borne parasitic nematodes. However, genetic variation in the parasites can overcome the resistance. This leads to a multiplication of virulence alleles within the parasite populations in the soil. We study how these interactions play out, with the aim to understand and predict how the host-parasite interaction plays out.
We have various thesis projects that relate to this very important field. Depending on your interests, it is possible to do research closely related to current agricultural practices or delve into bioinformatic analyses on large DNA/RNA seq datasets with 100s of samples. We investigate this topic in a multi-disciplinary team consisting of ‘wet-lab’ biologists and ‘computational’ biologists.
Your thesis work will help our understanding of current disease outbreaks (e.g. potato cyst nematodes and stem nematodes) and our understanding of the plant-nematode interaction in detailed controlled settings (e.g. through studying root-knot nematodes). These results ultimately help pest management in agriculture.
Methods and techniques: Greenhouse experiments; in vitro plant infection experiments; high-throughput sequencing (RNAseq, DNAseq); Bioinformatics; Data analysis (linux/R).