Dr Sebastian Eves-van den Akker is Head of the Plant-Parasite Interactions Group
The Crop Sciences Centre, Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge
Plant-parasitic nematodes are a major, and In some cases a dominant, threat to food security around the world. A finely tuned molecular dialogue between the plant and animal kingdoms, in this case, gives rise to the pathology and ultimately the crop losses. The research group of Dr Sebastian Eves-van den Akker aims to understand the nature of this dialogue in sufficient detail to identify sustainable routes to control. The group tackles this question largely from a genetic and molecular perspective: defining the genes involved in the inter-kingdom communication between plants and their parasitic nematodes.
Discover more:
https://www.plantsci.cam.ac.uk/research/groups/plant-parasitepathogen-interactions
and https://www.sebastianevesvandenakker.com/
Filmed at the Gatsby Plant Science Summer School, 2023.
#plantscience #cropscience #nematodes
My name is Sebastian Eves-van den Akker and I work at the University of Cambridge on plant diseases and plant pathology. There’s many different ways you can categorise the kind of research that we do. The one I’ve kind of settled on over the years is genetics,
So I work on genes. So I’m interested in what are the genes that are required for the communication between kingdoms of life. So between the plant kingdom and for example, the animal kingdom that are pathogens on the plants. So you know a lot of the kind of research that we do is thinking
About genes and genetics and that kind of thing. So I work on plant parasitic nematodes. These are…we like to call them an orphan disease and so an orphan disease means something that is objectively important but often overlooked. And one of the reasons why it’s an orphan
Diseases because they’re parasite roots. So they are literally overlooked because they’re below ground and so therefore they’re kind of figuratively overlooked. The way these nematodes work, although there are many different kinds of nematodes that infect many different plants effectively they live in the soil, they locate the roots of a plant growing
Nearby. Once they find the root, they use this needle like style it on their head end to pierce a whole in the root, move inside the root tissue and then move toward the centre of the root, the vascular cylinder. Once they get to the vascular cylinder here they display this
Really amazing ability to manipulate plant development immunity physiology and they cause the plant to make a new pseudo-organ. This new pseudo-organ swells up inside the plant. It drains the plant photosynthate and that’s how it contributes to the crop
Losses due to this disease and it feeds the nematode. And so the nematode will slowly withdraw nutrition from this pseudo-organ sort of over the course of several weeks and swelling up and then completes it life cycle. And so what we’re doing at what are the genes
In the plant that control this formation of this pseudo-organ and what are the genes in the nematode that allow it to interact with those developmental processes in the plant. And the whole kind of idea behind the work that we do is to try to understand
Enough about the biology of the system such that we could then block it in agriculture. So the reason why they these plant parasite nematodes are overlooked in research and in agriculture is because they’re below ground pathogens, and for that same reason they’re very
Difficult to work with. So because they infect the roots, roots are typically grown in soil, and so you can imagine if there’s something you want to observe, if you want to observe this pathology, then it can be a challenge if you’re trying to work with a soil substrate.
And so one of the major bottlenecks in our research in our lab, but also just the field in general is basically observing the pathology on roots. And so we’ve been thinking about this for a long time, so we decided to try and sort of address this
Constraint and trying to accelerate our ability to observe or phenotype the infection process. And so what we did was firstly start with the system where we had this transparent growing medium so at least we can see the thing, this is really important. And then based on this
Transparent growing medium, we used 3D printers and Raspberry Pi low-cost computers to build, machines, although they’re quite basic machines, but machines that will help us to image and to manipulate these Petri dishes such that we can do it at scale. So tens of thousands per day.
And then we couple this new hardware to new software. So trained an AI to recognise nematodes from the images that come out. The imaging machines such that we can then phenotype or observe this infection on tens of thousands of plants a day with relative ease.
We had to do a lot of plants for this phenotyping experiment, or we wanted the capability to be able to phenotype a lot of plants in the lab for two main reasons. The first one is replication, so as
Is common in biological systems, there’s variation and in order to account for the variation you do a lot of biological replicates so that you can take the average of those observations and that’s more likely representative of the true phenotype. And then you can compare the means, compare the
Averages effectively between your conditions. And that’s true in biology in general, but it’s very true in pathology and in plant parasitic nematode biology because the system is very variable. So there are lots of factors that contribute and so we need lots of replicates
To make sure we can account for some of this variation. So we will typically do 20 biological replicates per condition that we’re testing in any given experiment. And so that’s one reason. So anything we want to test, we multiply by 20. And then the other side of it is what we want to
Test? And so we want to test panels of diversity of plants to see whether they are susceptible to nematodes or whether they’re resistant to nematodes to identify those genes that contribute to susceptibility or contribute to resistance. And these panels are large.
So the panel that we recently screened was 550 different varieties of the plant and so 550 times 20 replicates is 10,000. So the numbers get big very quickly. And so you know if you have to do
Anything 10,000 times, even if it’s quick, it’s a lot of work. And so we really had to speed up our ability to do the phenotyping so that we could start to address these questions about the natural variation in nematode resistance and separability in different populations.
So I’ve always been interested in plants from when I was a child. So we had greenhouse and I used to grow plants and I was always very interested in that. And so I wanted to do…yes, when I knew
I was going to go to university and I wanted to study botany basically or plant sciences. I came from a family of academics and so this idea about being an academic wasn’t alien, and so I was kind of, you know, thinking about that pretty early on. And then when I got to university,
I went to the University of Leeds and I studied biology because there aren’t enough plant sciences courses available and the closest thing I could get was biology. So I chose a biology degree and then I did as much plant stuff as I possibly could and really enjoyed studying in the university.
And so I kind of just put that together and decided okay I’m going to go and do a PhD. And it was during my final year undergraduate project where you get to choose to do a reasonably
Extended like research in a lab, in the university where I first got exposed to actual research in a university, but also the field that I currently work in now. So my final year undergraduate project was on plant parasitic nematodes and I still work on plant parasitic nematodes today.
And I’m the kind of person who is interested in lots of things and so I get the impression to be honest, that whatever I had done my final year project in, I would probably just be working on that because I find that the more I look into something, the more interesting
It becomes and so then it’s self-fulfilling. So I did my final year undergraduate project in plant pathology and plant parasitic nematodes, and thought I’ll do that for the PhD’s. I applied for one PhD in that and I was very lucky to get it. And this PhD was rather unusual in that it
Was a joint appointment between two institutes. So between the University of Leeds, in Leeds, and the James Hunt Institute in Dundee. And it was like a proper joint position. So I would spend nine months in Leeds and then nine months in Dundee and then alternate for the four years.
So this is a lot of work and not very… you can imagine how difficult that would be, right but it was wonderful at the same time, because it doubles the number of people can talk to and it
Doubles the number of things you get exposed to and stuff like that. So it was super valuable. And I was working on frankly the same thing I’m doing right now so what are the genes that are important in this interaction between plant parasitic nematodes and their host plants. And
Yes, basically thoroughly enjoyed it and thought I want to keep doing more of this. So after that I applied to BBSRC the national funding for biological research in the UK for a fellowship. And at the time, these were called anniversary future leader fellowships. So it was a three-year
Position that allowed you to basically pursue independent research, so typically carry on the kind of thing that you were doing. So I was very fortunate to get that. And because it was a project I had written, I designed it the way that I wanted, not just for the science,
But also for the kind of career development stuff. So I actually at the time decided I like the joint position and so I’ll do that again. So I then had another joint position by my own design this time, but this time between the John Innes Centre in Norwich and the University of Dundee,
Again in Dundee, and so I do the same thing nine months, nine months for three years. And then coming towards the coming towards the end of that fellowship, I decided I wanted to keep going in this. And so I applied for another fellowship from BBSRC,
This time the David Phillips Fellowship so much larger and allows you to establish a group, but at that point I decided I had had enough of moving around and I want to consolidate. And you know there’s family considerations and things like that.
So that one I decided to apply to and move it to Cambridge and then started the group there proper. And then that was in 2018, about 4-5 years ago and the group’s just been growing in Cambridge ever since. And most recently, we just moved to our brand-new flagship building called
The Crop Science Centre, which is this initiative between the University of Cambridge and the NIAB, the National Institute of Agricultural Botany. And the idea of the alliance is to accelerate the transition of fundamental plant sciences into application. So this is like, you know,
Vindicating the whole idea behind all the research I’ve been doing at the time, which is to try to understand enough about the problem in order to prevent the problem in agriculture. And so now we’re really set up to try to push our fundamental science to impact.
I think the best thing about my job is the discovery aspect. So I’m most interested when we’re finding something new and then once we have found it, it’s almost less interesting to me and then I’ll move on to the next finding something new. So it’s definitely the process of
The finding something new rather than what it is that I have found that I find most interesting.