UC San Diego

An internal time keeping mechanism known as the circadian clock allows organisms to anticipate changes in the environment (Michael et al., 2003; Dodd, 2005). Environmental stressors have been shown to disrupt the circadian clock so it cannot accurately predict those changes. For example, a previous study revealed that a Pseudomonas syringae infection altered the clock, leading to long period and dampened circadian rhythms (Li et al., 2018). These clock phenotypes were triggered by host and pathogen responses (Li et al., 2018). In this thesis, we explored the molecular mechanisms that regulate the observed clock phenotypes upon infection. We found that pathogen-triggered responses directly target clock components, which likely results in the observed clock phenotypes. Such results suggest that, at least in plants, the outcome of host-pathogen interactions relies on the control of the circadian clock function.