Modulation of Host Cell Biology by Plant Pathogenic Microbes

Abstract

Plant-pathogen interactions can result in dramatic visual changes in the host, such as galls, phyllody, pseudoflowers, and altered root-system architecture, indicating that the invading microbe has perturbed normal plant growth and development. These effects occur on a cellular level but range up to the organ scale, and they commonly involve attenuation of hormone homeostasis and deployment of effector proteins with varying activities to modify host cell processes. This review focuses on the cellular-reprogramming mechanisms of filamentous and bacterial plant pathogens that exhibit a biotrophic lifestyle for part, if not all, of their lifecycle in association with the host. We also highlight strategies for exploiting our growing knowledge of microbial host reprogramming to study plant processes other than immunity and to explore alternative strategies for durable plant resistance.

MtNF-YA1, A Central Transcriptional Regulator of Symbiotic Nodule Development, Is Also a Determinant of Medicago truncatula Susceptibility toward a Root Pathogen

“…In M. truncatula, NF-YA1 knock out does not cause major developmental phenotypes for the plant but subtly modifies the associations with root inhabiting microbes. Knocking out MtNF-YA1 to enhance resistance to A. euteiches , a major threat for pea and alfafa (Gaulin et al, 2007) is an appealing approach to engineer durable resistance (Le Fevre et al, 2015) but will preclude nitrogen fixing symbiosis. However, genome editing (Feng et al, 2013) in non-legume crops for orthologs of MtNF-YA1 may become a fruitful biotech application of our findings.…”

Local endoreduplication as a feature of intracellular fungal accommodation in arbuscular mycorrhizas

“…Discussion Several microorganisms are known to manipulate the plant cell-cycle machinery (Chandran & Wildermuth, 2016;Wildermuth et al, 2017), and growing evidence is in favor of a convergent evolution in both pathogenic and symbiotic plant interactions toward the promotion of host cell divisions and/ or endoreduplication associated to microbe colonization (Wildermuth, 2010;Le Fevre et al, 2015;Chandran & Wildermuth, 2016).…”

Candidate gene based association mapping in Fusarium culmorum for field quantitative pathogenicity and mycotoxin production in wheat

“…It is known that genes associated with qualitative pathogenicity frequently encode secreted effectors, which disassemble the host defense response [6, 7]. From the point of view of the host, some hypotheses for explaining the molecular mechanisms that control quantitative disease resistance have been suggested, although the authors remark that this is a poorly understood field [5].…”