Jose Angel Salazar Lucas

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Project Title:

Summary: 

Insects vector globally important diseases that post significant challenges in agriculture. The transmission of plant viruses by sap-sucking insects accounts for half of all plant pathogens globally causing an annual cost of more than £24 billion. Current insecticide-based control methods are becoming ineffective because of insecticide resistant insect populations, and undesirable due to environmental pollution. 

Endosymbionts provide a promising new approach for controlling disease by making insects less susceptible to carrying pathogens by up regulating host immune systems and competing with pathogens while also rapidly spreading through insect population via maternal transmission. For example, introducing Wolbachia to mosquitos has reduced dengue virus by 77% in Indonesian field trails. Recent evidence has also shown that heritable facultative symbionts can eliminate virus infections in plant pests, such as aphids. However, symbiont-based control strategies have yet to be developed for controlling disease transmission in agriculture.

This PhD project will develop aphids as a model for understand symbiont-virus interactions in agriculture using: Pea aphids, two problematic agricultural viruses (Pea seed-borne mosaic virus and Pea enation mosaic virus, and several common facultative symbionts found in aphids (e.g. Hamiltonella defensa, Regiella insecticola and Serratia symbiotica). We will use microinjections to establish aphid-symbiont lines and then test interactions with plant viruses in controlled laboratory experiments using established techniques in the Henry lab. 

We will track microbial infection dynamics using qPCR and fluorescent protein expression. The student will benefit from the aphid facility in the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences (SBBS), at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), which includes controlled temperature rooms for culturing insects, established in-house aphid clones, microinjectors and molecular biology equipment for RNA extraction/RNAi probe development and Apocrita supercomputing facility to analyses the RNAseq data.

Supervisor:

• Dr Lee Henry

Research