RESEARCH PROFILE

My main research interests are plant signalling mechanisms mediating responses to biotic and abiotic stress, and the downstream responses underlying plant defence and adaptation to environmental stress. I am interested in applying and integrating different "omics" techniques for functional analysis of gene products and plant processes at a systems level.

Current work is investigating how plants respond to infection with the plant pathogen Botrytis cinerea. There is natural variation in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana for susceptibility to B. cinerea and different isolates of Botrytis cause different degrees of lesion development on the host plant. A significant fraction of this virulence variation is determined by the sensitivity of a given Botrytis isolate to Arabidopsis secondary metabolites. We are profiling gene expression and metabolites and integrating these data sets with pathogen susceptibility information to begin to elucidate how the plant responds to Botrytis infection at multiple levels.

Another area of current research is the role of cyclic nucleotides in plants. The first guanylyl cyclase (responsible for cGMP synthesis) was identified in plants in 2003. We have demonstrated that cGMP levels increase rapidly in Arabidopsis in response to salt and osmotic stress and are currently working to identify targets of cGMP in plant cells and investigating the role of specific guanylyl cyclases in plant responses to both biotic and abiotic stress.

BACKGROUND

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

• Elucidating Signalling Networks in Plant Stress Responses - SABR 1, with Beynon Jim, Warwick HRI, Ott, Sascha~Denby, Katherine J~Rand, David A~Finkenstadt, Barbel F~Buchanan-Wollaston, Vicky~Beynon, Jim L~Wild, David L~ Systems Biology Centre~Warwick HRI~Mathematics~Statistics~Systems Biology Centre~Warwick HRI~Systems Biology Centre~, Funded by: BBSRC, Project Start Date: 07/04/2008 Project End Date: 06/04/2013
• BSPP Undergraduate Vacation Bursary for Tessa Slater, Funded by: British Society for Plant Pathology, Project Start Date: 01/06/2012 Project End Date: 30/09/2012
  
  

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• Dr Katherine J Denby(2012) 'Metabolomic approaches reveal that cell wall modifications play a major role in ethylene-mediated resistance against Botrytis cinera.' Plant Journal, The (0960-7412)
• Morrissey, E. R., Juárez, M. A., Denby, K.J. and Burroughs, N. J.(2011) 'Inferring the time-invariant topology of a nonlinear sparse gene regulatory network using fully Bayesian spline autoregression' Biostatistics 12 (4), 682 - 694 (1465-4644) [article]
• Lloyd AJ, William Allwood J, Winder CL, Dunn WB, Heald JK, Cristescu SM, Sivakumaran A, Harren FJ, Mulema J, Denby K, Goodacre R, Smith AR, Mur LA(2011) 'Metabolomic approaches reveal that cell wall modifications play a major role in ethylene-mediated resistance against Botrytis cinerea.' Plant Journal, The 67 (5), 852 - 868 (0960-7412)
• Naidoo, S., Fouche-Weich, J., Law, P., Denby, K. J., Marco, Y. and Berger, D. K.(2011) 'A Eucalyptus bacterial wilt isolate from South Africa is pathogenic on Arabidopsis and manipulates host defences' Forest Pathology 41 (2), 101 - 113 (1437-4781)
• Breeze, E., Harrison, E., McHattie, S., Hughes, L., Hickman, R.D.G., Hill, C., Kiddle, S.J., Kim, Y.-S., Penfold, C.A., Jenkins, D.J., Zhang, C., Morris, K., Jenner, C.E., Jackson, S.D., Thomas, B., Tabrett, A., Legaie, R., Moore, J.D., Wild, D.L., Ott, S., Rand, D.A., Beynon, J., Denby, K.J., Mead, A. and Buchanan-Wollaston, V.(2011) 'High-resolution temporal profiling of transcripts during Arabidopsis leaf senescence reveals a distinct chronology of processes and regulation' The Plant Cell 23 (3), 873 - 894 (1040-4651) [article]

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