Y (Yuhao) Wang, MSc

Research:

Plant parasitic nematodes are a major cause of agricultural production losses. Pesticides that reduce the impact of nematodes on crop plans are being banned worldwide. The use of nematode-resistant crops is one of the few alternatives we have to defend plants against nematodes. However, the mechanisms of plant resistance to nematodes are largely elusive. In this project, we plan to investigate whether plants use their cell wall integrity machinery to fend off parasitic nematodes by using spatial transcriptomics. Furthermore, several microscopy and spectroscopy techniques will be used to study the cellular processes of feeding site initiation in space and time in Arabidopsis and tomato. By this, we hope to contribute to the development of broad-spectrum resistance to nematodes in major crops. My personal goals in this project are to elucidate novel plant-nematode interactions by integrating transcriptomics and microscopy data and to develop bioinformatics tools/packages on pattern identification of image data.