Joe Win
Post Doctoral Scientist
Contact details
Email: joe.win@sainsbury-laboratory.ac.uk
Research interests
I am fascinated by Nature and evolution of Life (Aren’t we all?). To me, nothing is more compelling than observing the arm race between plant pathogens and their hosts that are co-evolving in a vicious cycle of attack and defence. Some say it's "Gene-for-Gene" (Flor, 1971), some say it's like ‘Zig-Zag-Zig” (Jones and Dangl, 2006), and some say it's a dance between pathogen effectors and plant targets with the R proteins ready to “cut-in” (Nimchuk et al., 2001), but I would say it’s all out war! No win insight for anyone, yet battles rage on. (However, the pathogens are apparently having “Groovy times” (Kamoun, 2007)). So, let’s say it’s complicated. It’s just the thing that I am fascinated with, so to speak.
OK. Specifically, I am interrogating a notorious plant pathogen called Phytophthora infestans, an oomycete that caused havoc with blight disease on potatoes in Ireland in the 19th century. It also causes blight on tomato. We think this pathogen is suppressing plant immunity and manipulating plant metabolic processes through the activity of so called “effectors” that are translocated inside the plant cells and thought to interact with the targets inside the plant cell to perform their tasks. I am performing in planta co-immunoprecipitation experiments with the tagged effectors to fish out the interacting plant targets which are then identified by mass spectrometry (Thanks Alex!).
When I am not running gels, I make use of our amazing Mac’s to do bioinformatics with a focus on sequence analysis of oomycete genomes (currently, there are five oomycete genome sequences available – a lot of data if you ask me) to find out what make these pathogens so devastating and how we can devise measures for effective disease management.
Selected Publications
Yoshida, K., Saitoh, H., Fujisawa, S., Kanzaki, H., Matsumura, H., Yoshida, K., Tosa, Y., Chuma, I., Takano, Y., Win, J., Kamoun, S., Terauchi, R., 2009. Association genetics reveals three novel avirulence genes from the rice blast fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae. (Advance online publication). Plant Cell.
Song, J., Win, J., Tian, M., Schornack, S., Kaschani, F., Ilyas, M., van der Hoorn, R. A., Kamoun, S., 2009. Apoplastic effectors secreted by two unrelated eukaryotic plant pathogens target the tomato defense protease Rcr3. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA. 106: 1654-9.
Cheung, F., Win, J., Lang, J., Hamilton, J., Vuong, H., Leach, J., Kamoun, S., André Lévesque, C., Tisserat, N., Buell, C. R., 2008. Analysis of the Pythium ultimum transcriptome using Sanger and Pyrosequencing approaches. BMC Genomics. 9: 542.
Win, J., Morgan, W., Bos, J., Krasileva, K. V., Cano, L. M., Chaparro-Garcia, A., Ammar, R., Staskawicz, B. J., Kamoun, S., 2007. Adaptive evolution has targeted the C-terminal domain of the RXLR effectors of plant pathogenic oomycetes. Plant Cell. 19: 2349-69.
Tian, M., Win, J., Song, J., van der Hoorn, R., van der Knaap, E., Kamoun, S., 2007. A Phytophthora infestans cystatin-like protein targets a novel tomato papain-like apoplastic protease. Plant Physiology. 143: 364-77.
Win, J., Kanneganti, T. D., Torto-Alalibo, T., Kamoun, S., 2006. Computational and comparative analyses of 150 full-length cDNA sequences from the oomycete plant pathogen Phytophthora infestans. Fungal Genetics and Biology. 43: 20-33.
Win, J., Greenwood, D. R., Plummer, K. M. 2003. Characterization of a protein from Venturia inaequalis that induces necrosis in Malus carrying the Vm resistance gene. Physiological and Molecular Plant Pathology. 62: 193-202.
