Thinh Vo-Huang Quoc

Bio-informatician and PhD student, I take care of the team's bioinformatic needs while working on my own thesis regarding the characterisation of MAX effectors in Venturia inaequalis. I design, develop, and realise computational analyses on our V.inaequalis omics data — from genome assembly and annotation to candidate gene identification and large-scale protein secondary structure prediction using high-performance computing clusters.

The MAX effector structural family was first characterised and formalised in Magnaporthe oryzae (Guillen et al., 2015). Recent studies have shown evidences for their presence in V.inaequalis (Rocafort et al., 2022; Lahfa et al., 2024; Naour-Vernet et al., 2025). This combined with the known implications in virulence of many MAX effectors from M.oryzae makes them a promising study subject in V.inaequalis in other to reveal new ways to ultimately control the apple scabs disease. Thus, my PhD project consists of:

Identifying MAX effectors from our V.inaequalis genome collection

Characterising their distribution, structural variations, evolution history, and general functions

Developing bioinformatic methods and pipelines that enable the aforementioned points.

Guillen K de, Ortiz-Vallejo D, Gracy J, Fournier E, Kroj T, Padilla A. 2015. Structure Analysis Uncovers a Highly Diverse but Structurally Conserved Effector Family in Phytopathogenic Fungi. PLOS Pathogens 11, e1005228.

Lahfa M, Barthe P, Guillen K de, et al. 2024. The structural landscape and diversity of Pyricularia oryzae MAX effectors revisited. PLOS Pathogens 20, e1012176.

Naour--Vernet ML, Lahfa M, Maidment JHR, Padilla A, Roumestand C, Guillen K de, Kroj T, Césari S. 2025. Structure-guided insights into the biology of fungal effectors. New Phytologist 246, 1460–1477.

Rocafort M, Bowen JK, Hassing B, Cox MP, McGreal B, de la Rosa S, Plummer KM, Bradshaw RE, Mesarich CH. 2022. The Venturia inaequalis effector repertoire is dominated by expanded families with predicted structural similarity, but unrelated sequence, to avirulence proteins from other plant-pathogenic fungi. BMC Biology 20, 246.