The high selective pressures involved in the “arms race” between plants and their pathogens drives rapid evolution of genes involved in immunity on the host side and virulence on the pathogen side (Alcázar et al., 2011). However, plants are not typically infected by individual pathogens: they interact with a community of inter- and intraspecifically diverse microbes that also experience competitive pressures from one another. How these interactions among microbes affect their ability to cause disease and how the host plant influences the microbial community it harbors remain open questions for investigation.
Researchers have observed that P. syringae is a common natural pathogen of A. thaliana and that resistance to P. syringae infection varies among different A. thaliana accessions (Jakob et al., 2002). Recent work has shown that P. syringae strains isolated from A. thaliana leaf tissue are not only genetically diverse but also differ in their degree of virulence: many isolates harbor a polymorphism in the type three secretion system (T3SS), losing the ability to cause disease (Barrett et al., 2011; Kniskern et al., 2011). Such strains show increased growth in plant tissue when co-inoculated with other P. syringae isolates harboring an intact T3SS. This result suggests a model where non-pathogenic strains engage in “cheating” through taking advantage of the nutrients released from host cells infected by pathogenic strains (Barrett et al., 2011).
Works cited
Alcázar, R., Reymond, M., Schmitz, G., and de Meaux, J. (2011). Genetic and evolutionary perspectives on the interplay between plant immunity and development. Curr. Opin. Plant Biol. 14, 378–384.
Barrett, L.G., Bell, T., Dwyer, G., and Bergelson, J. (2011). Cheating, trade-offs and the evolution of aggressiveness in a natural pathogen population. Ecol. Lett. 14, 1149–1157.
Jakob, K., Goss, E.M., Araki, H., Van, T., Kreitman, M., and Bergelson, J. (2002). Pseudomonas viridiflava and P. syringae–natural pathogens of Arabidopsis thaliana. Mol. Plant Microbe Interact. 15, 1195–1203.
Kniskern, J.M., Barrett, L.G., and Bergelson, J. (2011). Maladaptation in wild populations of the generalist plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae. Evolution 65, 818–830.
