Meet the Faculty

Arun Chatterjee

Professor
Division of Plant Sciences

Phone: 573-882-2940
Fax: 573-882-1467
E-mail: ChatterjeeA@missouri.edu
Address: 7 Waters Hall

Education
B.S., Agriculture, Bihar Agricultural College, India
M.S., Mycology/Plant Pathology, Bihar Agricultural College, India
M.S., Microbiology, University of Guelph, Canada
Ph.D., Microbiology, University of Guelph, Canada

Description
Arun Chatterjee's research program focuses on plant pathogenic bacteria and factors that induce symptom development or trigger non-host resistance. Three specific areas are being investigated:

Factors that determine virulence and elicit host resistance.
Regulatory systems that control expression of genes for virulence and elicitors of defense responses.
Functional genomics of Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato, a pathogen of tomato and Arabidopsis thaliana.

The genetics of virulence factors are being studied in P. syringae pv. tomato, the casual agent of bacterial speck disease of tomato and the soft-rotting bacterium, E. carotovora. Regulatory mutants that regulate virulence genes up and down have been isolated. Chatterjee's lab has discovered a novel global regulatory system that modulates gene expression in various Erwinia species and P. syringae pathovars by causing translational repression and promoting decay of mRNAs of genes for virulence factors, effectors and their secretion and secondary metabolites. They have identified several other components, including regulatory RNA, that participate in this regulatory system. Studies are in progress to elucidate functions of each component and the regulatory heirarchy.

The whole genome sequences of the model plant, A. thaliana and its model pathogen, P. syringae pv. tomato strain DC3000 are now available. These resources now pave the way to identification of the genes of the pathogen as well as the host plant that are expressed and whose functions are required during various stages of interaction. As a prelude to such identification, we have initiated a genome-wide search for the targets of several regulators. These studies are expected to provide us with a global picture of the regulatory events controlling factors responsible for plant interaction by this model pathogen.