![]() ![]() Instead, they’ll have to combat the disease in other ways, such as spraying copper-based pesticides. ![]() The fact that Xe can sneak past tomato’s defenses means farmers can rely even less on inherent disease resistance. It made us wonder how binding between flagellin and FLS3 could be so dramatically altered.” Graduate student and study co-author Maria Malvino says, “It was surprising to see that only one amino acid change was making all the difference. Their work shows Xe’s flagellin proteins have changed by just one amino acid, but it’s enough to escape detection by tomato’s FLS3 receptors. Hind and her colleagues used laboratory and genomic modeling techniques to show one of tomato’s receptors, FLS3, no longer works to detect flagellin proteins in Xe. The tomato defense system keeps tabs on Xanthomonas and other bacteria with immune receptors that chemically detect flagella, the long whip-like tail structures that allow bacteria to move or “swim” through soil and plant tissues. It tells us we can’t completely rely on this trait to combat bacterial spot disease caused by Xe,” says Sarah Hind, assistant professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at Illinois and co-author on a pair of recent studies published in Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions and Physiological and Molecular Plant Pathology. This study is a great example of that ongoing battle in progress. The plant has to develop or acquire a new defense trait, but the process is much slower in plants compared to microbes. “It’s part of the evolutionary warfare between plants and pathogens, where the plant has some defense trait and then some portion of the pathogen population evolves to escape it. euvesicatoria (Xe), has evolved to avoid detection by the immune system of tomato plants. New research from the University of Illinois shows one Xanthomonas species, X. Like many microbes with short generation times, it can evolve at lightning speed to acquire beneficial traits, such as the ability to elude its host’s defense system. That’s the case for Xanthomonas, the organism that causes bacterial leaf spot disease in tomato and pepper plants. But in some species, evolution happens so quickly we can watch it in real-time. When we think of evolution, many of us conjure the lineage from ape to man, a series of incremental changes spanning millions of years. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
February 2023
Categories |