Corina Vlot-Schuster

Head of Crop Plant Genetics

Research interests:

• Plant Immunity: Crop yield is heavily affected by plant disease. My group’s research aims to understand immunity with the long-term goal of applying plant’s own defense mechanisms in future, sustainable crop protection strategies.
• Immune priming: part of plant innate immunity and a resource-efficient form of induced or systemic immunity. Immune priming can be induced by a variety of triggers, including by abiotic stress – my group studies salt-priming in tomato – or by interactions of plants with microbes – my group studies both systemic acquired resistance (triggered by pathogens) and induced systemic resistance (triggered by beneficial microbes in the rhizosphere microbiome).
• Plant-to-plant signaling: systemic immunity is associated with volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are emitted from induced/infected plant tissues and recognized as defense cues by receiver plants or plant tissues. They contribute to the establishment of induced resistance and its fortification in plant stands through plant-to-plant signal propagation.

In my research I further apply the following relevant approaches:

• Multi-stress tolerance: how do plant responses to biotic and abiotic stress interact?
• Plant phenotyping: semi-automated multispectral imaging to capture effects of immune priming and disease on plant fitness (and yield)
• CRISPR-Cas genome editing: we aim to enhance the tolerance of plants to stress and/or disease resistance, also through NGT-1 mutations.
• Core plant species included in our work: barley, wheat, tomato, Arabidopsis, and faba bean