Associate Prof. Jonathan Plett did his doctoral work at Queen’s University in Canada followed by a post doctoral research position at L’Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRAE; France).
Jonathan is a faculty member of the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University in Australia. Jonathan is a pioneer in decoding the signalling exchange between beneficial microbes and their host plants, with a specific focus on how microbes use a variety of proteins, metabolites and nucleic acids to circumvent plant immune responses.
Outcomes of this research are important for screening new plant lines to find the ‘sweet spot’ in immune response that enables plants to maximise nutritional benefits from mutualistic microbes without compromising disease resistance. These results will result in more productive tree plantations and agricultural systems.
