Title. Out damn spot: bacterial virulence strategies leading to plant disease.

Summary. Food security has rocketed up the political and scientific agenda. Developing broad-spectrum disease resistance crops would contribute significantly to enhancing food productivity. It is over 20 years since the first plant disease resistance gene was discovered yet our knowledge of how R proteins function remains limited. Moreover, disease resistance is rapidly overcome in the field. An alternative strategy to increasing crop resilience to pathogens is to understand how pathogens deploy effector molecules to cause disease and rewire host signalling networks. This talk will cover new insights into how the hemi-biotroph Pseudomonas syringae deploys ~30 effector molecules to cause disease on the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, which have emerged from a combination of high resolution microarrays, real time imaging, metabolite analysis and reverse genetic approaches.