Edited by Essaid Ait Barka & Christophe Clément
From the Preface
Both aerial and subterranean plant organs are constantly exposed to intimate contacts with a plethora of various microorganisms, including viruses, bacteria, oomycetes, fungi, and eukaryotic protozoans.
The outcome of interactions between plants and microbes can be neutral, detrimental or even beneficial for the photoautotrophic organisms. In this sense, encounters between plant cells and both ‘friendly’ and ‘hostile’ microbes (such as those in symbiotic and pathogenic interactions, respectively) trigger a range of highly dynamic plant cellular responses.
In the second half of the twentieth century a major focus of microbiology was to understand the behaviour of model plant-microbes under controlled laboratory conditions. These investigations demonstrate that the interplay between plants and their pathogens is more than just a series of puzzles for plant biologists to unravel since it is a matter of life or death for the plant.
Plant pathogens establish an intimate relationship with their host plants and use the natural pathways for cellular and tissue communication in order to spread through the plant. Unless a defence is mounted, the cost to the host is the formation of symptoms and reduced productivity.
Usually detrimental encounters manifest themselves as disease, which in extreme cases can result in full collapse of plant tissues. By contrast, benign contacts usually give rise to symbiotic relationships that typically support the plant metabolism and lead to a normal or even increased growth.
This book explores a number of interesting microbial plant pathogens or symbionts and the responses they may elicit in their plant hosts.
Why do some microbes attack certain plants but not others? Is it because these microbes need the weapons required to infect certain plants or because that some plants are equipped with better arsenals to counteract the attack? Why is it that some microbes are pathogenic and others are not? How plants defend themselves following pathogen attack? How plants interact with beneficial microorganisms?
These are some areas which were explored in this book in order to cover a few aspects of the plant–microbe interactions.
The demands for high levels of crop productivity have led to the development of complex chemical control regimes involving pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. Nevertheless, these compounds also have their limitation and inconvenient. One of the goals of plant biology has been to improve our understanding, not just our knowledge, of natural defence pathways and thus reduce our dependence on chemical control. The increasingly complex inter-relationships among plants, pathogens, and other microorganisms and viruses have renewed enthusiasm for research in these systems during the past decades. This part was treated in many chapters of this book. The corresponding chapters discuss promising strategies and approaches to development of effective biological controls for plant diseases based on plant-microbe interactions.
Furthermore, other chapters involve the molecular events that constitute critical steps of plant-pathogen interactions and which seem to involve ligand-receptor mechanisms for pathogen recognition and the induction of signal transduction pathways in the plant that lead to defence responses.
The critical role of host-pathogen interaction in developing new and alternative biocontrol agents that promote plant health and disease resistance in crop pathosystems is also discussed.
Overall, this book is a significant addition to the literature concerning the plant–microbe interactions, not only for the newcomers in the field but also for the experts. It provides a broad overview and supplies many important references related to both microorganisms and hosts.
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