Meet our new professors
Pietro Spanu, Professor of Molecular Plant Pathology, Department of Life Sciences
The lecture is free to attend and open to all, but registration in advance in required – register via Eventbrite (external link) for your place.
To interact about this lecture on Twitter, use the hashtag #foodhackers.
This event is being live-streamed via the Imperial YouTube channel.
Abstract
We share the food and drink at our dinner table with many other organisms, some of whom make poor guests. Plant pathogens and pests constantly threaten to undermine the quality and quantity of the food crops that sustain us. Many such microbes infect their hosts by subverting normal metabolic processes and we have recently found they do this by hacking into the information networks that control the plants’ immune system.
I will guide you through some of my research which gives us glimpses of how fungi deploy their hacking skills to attack cereal crops. The long-term hope is that we grow to understand these mechanisms, and continue to keep unwanted microbes off our guest list.
Biography
Pietro Spanu’s peripatetic childhood took him round Europe, mostly in Italy and the UK. His research started in Turin, Italy, where he graduated with a Laurea in Biological Sciences in 1987; he then trained as a postgraduate and in 1991 obtained a DPhil in Botany from the University of Basel, Switzerland. After a postdoctoral at the Friedrich-Miescher Institute in Basel, he took up a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in Oxford in 1992. Here, he started working on plant pathogenic fungi, continuing this work when taking up a Lectureship at Imperial in 1999.
His best known contribution to science has been the leadership of the international consortium for the sequencing and interpretation of the barley powdery mildew genome. His spare time is devoted to preparing meals for his family, and dragging them to sail around the British coast and beyond.