Project Seeks to Help Plants Fight Pathogens in Rising Temperatures
A global study looks at how plants respond to pathogen stress in elevated ozone levels to breed more resilient plants.
A global project seeks to help plants better fight pathogens as temperatures rise. Courtney Leisner, assistant professor at the school of plant and environmental sciences at Virginia Polytechnic University, is part of this global project, which seeks to study bacterial spot. Xanthomonas, the pathogen that causes bacterial spot, is a significant threat to tomato and pepper growers worldwide. The pathogen can infect nearly 400 different plant species, and there is no known cure.
“We have existing data to show that when pepper plants that are resistant to Xanthomonas are inoculated with Xanthomonas and exposed to ozone stress that the resistance breaks down,” she says. “This made us interested in understanding how temperature would impact the virulence of Xanthomonas and the ability of pepper to mount a defense response to Xanthomonas.
She says preliminary research shows that as pepper plants are exposed to a pathogen or elevated ozone levels alone, the plants respond differently than when exposed to combined stress of a pathogen and elevated ozone levels.
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“The combined stress is more akin to a normal growing environment, so by doing a multifactorial stress experiment we aim to understand more about how plants respond in a natural growing environment,” Leisner says. “We hope this will lead to translational outcomes for the fresh produce industry by developing pepper plants that have durable resistance to Xanthomonas even as growing temperatures rise.”
This study is part of a joint agreement between the U.S., Germany and UK to future roof plants.
“This international team is able to leverage their expertise in plant pathology, bacteriology and physiology to understand not only how pepper plants can defend themselves from path pathogens with rising temperatures, but how virulence or the pathogen may also change with rising temperatures,” Leisner says.
Leisner says the plants are first germinated in a greenhouse, then inoculated with the pathogen for testing.
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“We then place the plants in the open-top chambers (located at Auburn University) and elevate the air temperatures around the plants using heated air that blows into the chambers,” she says.
Research contributor Neha Potnis, associate professor of bacteriology at Auburn University, will study the environmental factors that influence the plant’s pathogen dynamics, and Leisner will assess physical, chemical and biological changes in the peppers from heat stress.
“The end goal of this project is to establish durable management of resistance genes in pepper in the context of variable environmental conditions,” Leisner says.
Source: www.thepacker.com
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