The phyllosphere - the aerial parts of plants - harbors a rich and diverse microbial community, including bacteria, filamentous fungi, yeasts and viruses. This environment is both harsh and dynamic, exposing microbes to a range of biotic and abiotic stresses (e.g. low nutrient availability, ultraviolet radiation, temperature and humidity oscillations, toxic compound exposure). Yeasts have diverse ways to cope with these conditions and compete with plant pathogens, providing protection. To date, the adaptive traits and competitive mechanisms by which yeasts colonize the phyllosphere remain largely unknown.
What will you be doing? You will be joining the
MiCRop consortium (Microbial Imprinting for Crop Resilience) aimed at harnessing the genomic potential of plant-associated microbes as a new platform for improved stress resilience of future crops and sustainable food production.
In this project, we will leverage our recently established ‘Phyllosphere Yeast Repository’ - an extensive collection of yeast isolates, genomes and metabolomes – to assess: (i) competition and cooperation in the phyllosphere, and (ii) the potential of yeasts to control phyllosphere pathogens. You will conduct laboratory and greenhouse experiments to investigate yeast-plant and yeast-pathogen interactions in the phyllosphere. To achieve this, you will adopt a combination of classical microbiology techniques (cultivation, microscopy), chemical analyses (gas chromatography), molecular biology (qPCR, metabarcoding, transcriptomics, yeast mutagenesis), plant bioassays, and a range of bioinformatics analyses (genome mining, comparative genomics, multi-omics integration).
What will you be contributing? - Perform lab and greenhouse experiments focused on yeast-plant and yeast-pathogen interactions
- Integrate experimental findings using bioinformatics to analyze multi-omics data, linking microbial functions to ecological performance
- Closely collaborate with MiCRop team and the WUR Bioinformatics Group
- Present your research at national and international conferences, and publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals
- Supervise HBO and MSc students
- Contribute to maintaining a friendly, inclusive and collaborative working atmosphere within the research group