Barbara Valent, PhD
University Distinguished Professor
Biosecurity Research Institute Professor of Crop Infectious Diseases
4108 Throckmorton PSC
1712 Claflin Road
Manhattan, KS 66506
Ph: 785-532-2336
Biography
Barbara Valent was born in Perry, Iowa and grew up in Colorado. She studied at the University of Colorado at Boulder, earning a B.A. degree in chemistry and a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry. She was awarded a NIH National Research Service Award to conduct postdoctoral work in yeast molecular genetics at Cornell University. She then returned to the University of Colorado to begin working on the rice blast system. Beginning in 1985, Valent served as a principal investigator, research leader and then research manager in Central Research and Development, the DuPont Company. She became Research Fellow and Technical Leader of the Genetic Disease Resistance Program in DuPont Agricultural Products in 1997. Valent joined the Department of Plant Pathology at Kansas State University in 2001 as a Professor and was recognized as a University Distinguished Professor in 2002. In 2007, she was named a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.
Education
- Post Doctoral Associate NIH Post-doctoral Fellow, Cornell University, 1980 - 1982
- Ph.D. Biochemistry, University of Colorado, Boulder, 1978
- B.A. Chemistry, University of Colorado, Boulder, 1972
Research
The filamentous fungus Magnaporthe oryzae (synonym of Pyricularia oryzae) is a damaging plant pathogen causing blast diseases on multiple cereal crops. The ancient rice blast disease and the recently emerged wheat blast disease are significant threats to global food security. Our research focuses on effectors, which are small secreted proteins the pathogen uses to turn off plant defenses and cause disease. A subset of effectors, called avirulence (AVR) effectors, trigger host resistance when recognized by the plant’s resistance (R) gene-encoded receptors. Thus, effectors are key to the pathogen’s ability to cause disease, as well as to the pathogen’s ability to overcome resistance we deploy to protect crops. Our current research falls within three major areas:
- We focus on how the fungus causes blast disease using fungal molecular genetics and live-cell fluorescence microscopy to visualize effector protein dynamics as the fungus grows inside living rice cells during early infection. Processes used by the fungus to deliver effectors inside living rice cells in order to hijack those cells represent novel targets for disease control.
- Understanding how the blast fungus rapidly defeats resistance in the field will lead to strategies for durable disease resistance. We are investigating a role for dispensable fungal mini-chromosomes in genome dynamics associated with AVR effector genes, which are often deleted completely from strains that have overcome the corresponding R gene-mediated recognition and are located in different genomic regions in other strains.
- Wheat blast emerged in South America and recently spread to South Asia and Africa. Research on the wheat blast fungus is restricted to a Biosafety Level-3 (BSL-3) laboratory in the Biosecurity Research Institute on campus. We are focused on identifying effective resistance and on understanding disease biology critical to keeping blast disease out of U.S. wheat.