How plant immune systems protect them from disease - Jonathan Jones 🦠😷

While plants are the source of food for almost all other organisms, many of these interactions with other organisms reduce plant growth, either by removal of plant tissues (eating), or by causing plant disease. Bacteria, oomycetes, fungi, insects and other herbivores, viruses, and even other plants can infect or damage plants.

Microbial disease-causing organisms are called pathogens, and herbivores that eat vegetative tissues and seeds (especially those of crops) are referred to as pests. Most plants are resistant to most plant pathogens, and many successful pathogens are highly specialized for their success on particular hosts. So what are plant pathogens? How do they attack plants? And how do plants detect and defend themselves against attack?

0:00 Introduction
4:30 Plant / microbe interactions
7:01 Arabidopsis downy mildew
10:07 Rusts attack wheat
13:37 Lifestyles of rich and famous plant pathogens
15:29 Necrotrophs make toxins which affect animals and plants
17:19 Bacteria and viruses cause important plant diseases
23:32 Resistance genes
28:08 The first layer of plant immunity
39:44 The second layer of plant immunity
40:29 A field trial
43:42 How do NLRs work in populations of wild plants?
47:56 Direct and indirect recognition: guards and guardees/decoys
48:46 Resistance proteins

Speaker profile: Dr Jonathan Jones is Project Leader at the The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwick UK.
"I did Maths/Physics/Chemistry A levels, but switched to Biology at University, hoping to contribute solutions to ecological challenges that were apparent even in 1971. I ended up with a Botany degree, and then a PhD in Genetics at the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge, studying wheat cytogenetics. After a postdoc in symbiotic nitrogen fixation in Harvard, I worked in the private sector at Advanced Genetic Sciences, California, where I began making genetically modified plants, investigating the requirements for high-level expression of transgenes. In 1988, I took up my current position at The Sainsbury Lab in Norwich. I love both the technology and the biology in my research. I’ve enjoyed developing new genetic methods investigating and interpreting the molecular basis of disease resistance, and how pathogens circumvent it. I also like to engage with the public as a strong advocate for controlling crop disease using Resistance genes from wild crop relatives introduced via genetic modification and/or gene editing. This year we are resuming field trials to evaluate the use of such genes to confer late blight resistance in GM potato."

Filmed at the Gatsby Plant Science Summer School, 2017.
#plantscience #plantdisease #plantpathology