Dr. Mary Beth Mudgett, the Stanford Friends University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, is the Senior Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences in the School of Humanities & Sciences. She received her doctorate in biochemistry at University of California, Los Angeles and has been a professor in Stanford's Department of Biology since 2002. Her research group studies plant-pathogen interactions, focusing on the biochemical mechanisms that pathogens use to manipulate the plant immune system resulting in disease outbreaks. As president of the International Society for Plant-Microbe Interactions, Mudgett launched a series of virtual symposia and platforms to enable networking on a global scale, while creating an inclusive environment to hear from the society’s diverse stakeholders. Mudgett is also passionate about teaching and mentorship. She has launched new initiatives within biology to embrace different learning styles and enhance the student experience in the classroom. She also leads efforts to reshape introductory science and math courses to better support students with different levels of preparation for success in STEM majors. Mudgett partners on a school initiative to provide teaching mentorship support for junior faculty and their mentors to enhance best practices across the curricula. As co-chair of Stanford’s Academic Continuity Group, Mudgett helped the university blaze a path through the thicket of teaching challenges posed by the pandemic. She helped to solve problems involving online learning and curriculum development and to create the infrastructure and support needed for faculty, staff, and students to safely return to in-person instruction. In addition, she directed the Dean’s Fellows Program, which provided teaching and research opportunities for graduate students completing their degrees and facing a job market made challenging by the pandemic. In her current role, she is dedicated to champion the core missions in research, teaching, and mentoring within the natural science cluster and broader communities.
Dr. Mudgett's laboratory studies the biochemical mechanisms used by bacterial pathogens to alter plant physiology during infection. Extensive genetic and phenotypic data indicate that the bacterial type three secretion (T3S) system and its protein substrates (referred to as T3S effectors) are the major virulence determinants that promote pathogen colonization in plants. The paradigm for T3S effector function has been that these proteins collectively suppress host defense responses to promote colonization and disease progression. The biological function(s) of most T3S effectors, however, is extremely limited and biochemical support for this paradigm is lacking. Thus, the goal of their research has been to elucidate T3S effector function, identify host targets, and provide fundamental knowledge of how perturbation of of distinct nodes in host signaling pathways leads to bacterial pathogenesis. To do so, the lab studies the T3S effectors in Xanthomonas euvesicatoria (Xcv), a Gram-negative, facultative parasite that causes leaf spot disease in tomato and pepper. Understanding how plant innate immunity is regulated and how pathogens manipulate plant hosts is is fundamental knowledge that is required for the development of novel strategies to prevent and/or eliminate plant disease in the field.
Currently, the group is investigating: 1) how Xanthomonas employs a transcription repressor to rewire host transcription during infection to alter immune signaling and growth programs; 2) how Xanthomonas effectors target 14-3-3 phospho-binding proteins to alter immune complexes and signaling; 3) the impact of Xanthomonas-mediated acetylation of host proteins that are involved with lipid signaling and microtubule dynamics; 4) how Xanthomonas uses a "default to death and defense strategy" to promote plant pathogenesis; and 5) unique natural products made during pathogen infection in tomato by applying a untargeted metabolomics in conjunction with transcriptomics to accelerate the discovery of new antimicrobial compounds and their biosynthetic pathways.
