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National Institute for Science and Technology in Plant-Pest Interactions | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Plants grow in complex environments and must interact in an adaptive way with their biotic and abiotic components. Among the environmental limitations that restrict plant growth, pathogens and insects cause major crop losses worldwide and represent major constraints to the Brazilian agriculture. The NIST in Plant-Pest Interactions was assembled to fulfill the need to advance our knowledge on the molecular and functional bases of biotic interactions among plants, pathogens and insects economically relevant to the Brazilian agriculture and to foster effective collaborations under a multidisciplinary context that are likely to contribute with procedures best suited for collecting pertinent data in a most efficient way. The general mission of the NIST in Plant-Pest Interactions is to stimulate a scientific environment of multidisciplinary collaborations that aim at investigating the molecular mechanisms related to plant responses to biotic stresses, with emphasis on regulatory networks involved in plant-biotic interactions that lead to disease or resistance. This will ultimately lead to the development of molecular strategies for engineering superior crops and to the training of human resources in emerging fields of molecular biology within the context of collaborative, integrative and broad-spectrum oriented research programs. Our research projects include studies of experimental and crop plants in a multidisciplinary context covering plant mechanisms of disease resistance and immunity, principles of infection and disease, signal transduction, pathogen biodiversity and insect adaptation to host plants.
The headquarters of the NIST in Plant-Pest Interactions is the Agricultural Biotechnology Research Institute (BIOAGRO) at Universidade Federal de Viçosa (UFV). This Institute hosts 27 well-equipped research laboratories from different areas of molecular biology and biotechnology, 24 senior researchers and more than 500 undergraduate and graduate students. From these, 6 (six) laboratories are available for the project, in addition to 3 (three) greenhouses, a plant controlled growth unit, two additional associated laboratories from the Biochemistry Department and one from the Animal Biology Department. The microscopy core facility and proteomics core facility at UFV serve the project providing equipments and technical support.
Elizabeth Pacheco Batista Fontes e-mail: bbfontes@ufv.br; bethfontes@funarbe.org.br; bethfontes@pesquisador.cnpq.br
Minas Gerais UFV- Universidade Federal de Viçosa UFOP- Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto UFSJ- Universidade Federal de São João Del Rei UFVJM- Universidade Federal dos Vales do Jequitinhonha e Mucuri Distrito Federal CENARGEN- Embrapa Recursos Genéticos e Biotecnologia CNPH- Embrapa Hortaliças UnB- Universidade de Brasília Goiás CNPAF- Embrapa Arroz e Feijão Rio de Janeiro UFRJ- Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro São Paulo UNICAMP- Universidade Estadual de Campinas IAC- Instituto Agronômico de Campinas
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