Berasategui Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2024

Cross-kingdom symbionts: plant pathogens as insect mutualists.

By vectoring plant pathogens, herbivorous insects are key determinants in the epidemiology of numerous plant blights. For a vector-borne phytopathogen, natural selection favors upgrading insect fitness to enhance transmission to an uninfected plant. It is currently unclear how a microbe balances this dual symbiotic lifestyle, featuring markedly different interaction outcomes: as a plant pathogen and an insect mutualist. Likewise, little is known about the molecular mechanisms underlying pathogen specificity, and the genomic basis and consequences of cross-kingdom host shifts along the parasitism-to-mutualism continuum. I will tackle these questions using an emergent model system: the…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.