Making Milestones: Planting the seeds for the future of pathogen resistance

Johannes was meant to go home after his working holiday. Instead, he got a job at a biotech company, which kickstarted his journey to becoming a PhD student at the Centre for Crop and Disease Management (CCDM) trying to manage one of the most devastating fungi in peas, chickpeas and lentils – Ascochyta.

Johannes Debler is completing a PhD at the CCDM, co-supervised by Curtin’s Dr Bernadette Henares, Dr Lars Kamphuis, Dr Robert Lee and Professor Karam Singh. Johannes and Bernadette reflect on how they are working to understand the plant pathogen, the challenges of being at the mercy of nature and the research relationship.

Johannes:

I grew up in Germany, so I went to university over there. After completing five years of study, I came to Australia to travel. My one-year working holiday turned into two, and then eventually I started working in a little biotech company in Bunbury. Eventually, a job as a research assistant at Curtin came up and that’s how I ended up in the CCDM.

Bernadette and I have been working together for 10 years, so our journey has been a little different. She is less of a ‘real’ supervisor – our relationship is more of a collegial experience. In the beginning, she was one of the postdocs and eventually she got put in charge of her own project where I was assigned as a Research Assistant in her line management. I wanted to advance my career as a researcher in the centre, and pursuing a PhD was one way to do that.

My project is focussed on the Ascochyta blight – a fungal infection in peas, chickpeas and lentils. Also known as black spot, this fungus is the most devastating for these plants. I’m interested in identifying the genes in the fungi that are responsible for the infection and destruction of the host plant by using the latest DNA sequencing and gene cloning technologies.Ideally, we hope to advance the understanding how the pathogen works on a molecular level. To do this, you look at three different components: the plant, the fungal pathogen and how they interact.

Mostly, the fungi produce ‘weapons’ that interact like a key into a lock with its respective plant. If we can find the ‘weapons’, we can start looking for the locks. From there, we can either chop the locks off or remove the weapons from the pathogen, which would result in a plant that will stay healthy. This knowledge can then be used by plant breeders and industry as a cost-effective way to combat pathogens in the future.

There are always challenges as we’re at the mercy of nature. Sometimes during an experiment, the plants don’t behave in the way you need it to. For example, insects might kill or eat the plants after you’ve planted them, or you might have used a bad batch of potting mix with no nutrients for the plants to grow, or the spores of the fungi you’ve been growing don’t stick.

Molecular biology is a little bit like black magic.

Physically, you can’t really see what’s going on, and sometimes the experiment just stops working for whatever reason. There’s a lot of problem solving and debugging, which is what makes it fun.

As a team, the Centre has established some techniques for this pathogen that no one’s done before. We were the first to genetically modify our pathogen and now we can do that for two genes at a time. Since then, we have also established a new genetic sequencing method.

A highlight of the PhD was going to the European Conference on Fungal Genetics ECFG last year in Innsbruck, Austria, and seeing what the other half of the world was working on. It was a great conference because we could finally meet some of the younger early career researchers in Europe, who we’ve followed over the last year or two. Competing in the national FameLab competition has also been an unexpected and interesting experience of the PhD, which I ended up winning in late September.

Bernadette:

Johannes is a very independent person. He’s always inquisitive, motivated and likes putting things together. But his interest really lies in basic research; in the fundamentals of how we want to help growers. And he finds out ways to do that – I don’t have to tell him how. It was for this reason that we convinced him to do a PhD.

I’m quite young in terms of research supervisors. I feel like I’m closer to the students, so it’s easy for me to communicate with them. I understand what motivates them. Different students have different ways of being motivated. Some will require very little motivation and some students will require more positive reinforcement. You cannot have the same supervisory style for all students. What you hope for, is that your research students will have similar aspirations to you when working on a project.

It’s easy to communicate with Johannes. We’re happy discussing the smallest or the biggest of data results. We’re also able to go beyond just the discussion of the project. It’s easy to address whatever is needed in the lab or in the office. We don’t feel that, ‘Oh, this is an embarrassing result, I’m not going to discuss it with my supervisor.’  We don’t have that at all.

Johannes’ expertise lies in looking for new protocols, finding if they exist already somewhere for a different application and bringing it back to the lab. He’s always interested in attending conferences and workshops and bringing all this knowledge back to us. He’s not scared to try new things. We’re all happy for him to try these things and if they work, it becomes part of our standard protocol.

The group dynamic is very important at the Centre. That’s where you get your motivation – not just from your supervisor, but from all the others in the group. All the skills along the way can be taught and learned, but if you don’t get along with the rest of the people in the lab, it’s going to be a hard three years.

My one piece of advice to students completing a PhD is to celebrate the small wins. It’s what you get along the way. The big win is at the very end, but you’ll come across many frustrations and lots of small wins, and you should celebrate them whenever they happen.

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