Honours scholarships are available!

The following projects are available for Honours in the Solomon lab (note that some the skills gained in the project are shown in brackets) …

Studying pathogen proteins that cause disease

• How does wheat respond to the effector protein exposure at the transcript level? (RNA isolation, RNA sequencing, bioinformatics)
• How are these effector proteins regulated? The genes encoding these effector proteins are only expressed either during infection or under very specific in vitro conditions. Why? (Molecular biology, promoter analysis using GFP fusions, genetic modification techniques)
• Localisation of the effector proteins during infection. Where do the effector proteins go during infection? This can be monitored using confocal microscopy and fluorescence. (confocal microscopy, mircoscopy sample preparation techniques, molecualr biology)
• Do the pathogen effector proteins bind to wheat proteins during infection? (yeast 2-hybrid analysis, co-immunoprecipitation, molecular biology)

Characterising the Zymoseptoria tritici-wheat interaction

• Genome sequencing and comparative genomics of Australian Z. tritici isolates (DNA isolation, genome sequencing, bioinformatics).
• Isolating pathogen proteins responsible for disease (protein expression, protein purification, molecular biology)
• Determining the proteome/metabolome of the pathogen during infection (proteomics, metabolomics)

Novel metabolite discovery and characterisation

• Are pathogen secondary metabolites involved in causing disease? If not, what do they do? (genetic modification techniques, basic chemistry, molecular biology, pathogenicity assays)
• What novel metabolites do fungal secondary metabolites produce? What do they do? (molecular biology, liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, chemistry)

And remember, as the research in the Solomon lab directly impacts on the Australian wheat industry, Honours scholarships are available for talented students through the Grains Research and Development Corporation.