Author Profile

Mihwa Yi

Current Position: Research Associate, Fungal Molecular Genetics Lab, Department of Plant Pathology, Kansas State University, USA

Education: PhD: Fungal Plant Pathology, Department of Plant Microbiology, Seoul National University, Korea; BS: Applied Biology and Chemistry, Seoul National University, Korea

Non-scientific Interests: Travelling, learning languages, reading, and cats!

Rice is not only one of the most important staple crops worldwide, but also an essential food for every meal for me and most people in Korea. I became very interested in the rice blast disease when I started to study plant pathology during my undergraduate courses. The combination of rice blast and rice is a good model system for studying fungal pathogen-host plant interactions in terms of both molecular biology and traditional genetics approaches. I worked on the functional analyses of several pathogenicity-related genes in the rice blast fungus for my PhD thesis project with my mentor Dr. Yong-Hwan Lee. LHS1 was one of the most interesting genes among those characterized genes. The most exciting part was to see the effects on both compatible and incompatible interactions that were caused by the deletion of LHS1. Results from work with the lhs1 deletion mutant could shed light on the function of ER chaperones as important players in the development of disease caused by fungal plant pathogens because this mutant is defective in the secretion of proteins including effectors. I hope this report accelerates the dissection of the in planta secretion mechanisms of fungal pathogens, which are still largely unknown. I hope to continue exploring fungal effectors and their delivery systems which modulate plant responses, and ultimately wish to provide an efficient control strategy for rice blast by understanding this pathosystem.