Insect transmission of Plant Bacterial Pathogens | PLP 6905
3 Credits
The insect transmission process includes two main steps, both taking place during vector feeding on plants. The first step consists of pathogen acquisition by the vector from the source plant (host); the second step is the inoculation from the vector into a recipient plant. However, in order to successfully accomplish the pathogen transmission, many interactions between the host, pathogen, and vector at the biochemical and molecular levels are involved.
The bacterium-insect vector interactions involve propagation, circulation, and persistance with the vector body. The growth of plant-pathogenic bacteria in the vector's hemolympth indicates that the hemolymph contains all the necessary nutrients for bacterial growth. Thus, insect-transmitted plant-pathogenic bacteria may alter their vectors' fitness, survival, behavior, and metabolism. In addition to nutrients, bacteria can take up energetic nucleotides, such as ATP, from its vector. Interestingly, some bacteria are not circulative within the vector body, but localize only in the foregut where they multiply and form biofilm.
The interactions between the pathogenic bacteria and their host plant are limiting factor for insect transmission. Vector-plant interactions including attraction, preference, host specificity, and feeding site are also important factors relevent to transmission. The availability of bacterial cells to the vector in the host tissues is essential for the acquisition step. In addition, in certain cases, the bacteria possess different transcriptomic types in plant and only one type is transmissible. In brief, tritropic interactions should be well established in order to achieve successful transmission.
The course will discuss all aspects of insect transmission of plant pathogenic bacteria and will include several study cases. Students will actively participate in lectures by reading and evaluating publications prior to the lectures. There will be two lectures per week -- a two-hour lecture about a main topic and a one-hour lecture for discussion or guest lecture. Guest lectures will be given by renowned professors and researchers in vector-borne plant bacterial disease. Some guest lectures will be in prerecorded video format. One research paper on a vector-borne bacterial disease (of student's choice) will be required for course completion.