Plant Microbe Interactions in Post Genomic Era: Perspectives and Applications

Abstract

Deciphering plant-microbe interactions is a promising aspect to understand the benefits and the pathogenic effect of microbes and crop improvement. The advancement in sequencing technologies and various 'omics' tool has impressively accelerated the research in biological sciences in this area. The recent and ongoing developments provide a unique approach to describing these intricate interactions and test hypotheses. In the present review, we discuss the role of plant-pathogen interaction in crop improvement. The plant innate immunity has always been an important aspect of research and leads to some interesting information like the adaptation of unique immune mechanisms of plants against pathogens. The development of new techniques in the post - genomic era has greatly enhanced our understanding of the regulation of plant defense mechanisms against pathogens. The present review also provides an overview of beneficial plant-microbe interactions with special reference to Agrobacterium tumefaciens-plant interactions where plant derived signal molecules and plant immune responses are important in pathogenicity and transformation efficiency. The construction of various Genome-scale metabolic models of microorganisms and plants presented a better understanding of all metabolic interactions activated during the interactions. This review also lists the emerging repertoire of phytopathogens and its impact on plant disease resistance. Outline of different aspects of plant-pathogen interactions is presented in this review to bridge the gap between plant microbial ecology and their immune responses.

Keywords: PHI-base; beneficial interactions; emerging pathogens; genome-scale metabolic modeling; plant immune response; plant–microbe interactions.

FIGURE 1

Illustration showing host–pathogen activities which determine the host wins or pathogen wins situation. A conceptual diagram showing the balance mechanism between host–pathogens activities. When host activities suppress the pathogen effect then host wins and plants survive the pathogen attack but when pathogen defeat the host defense system then pathogen wins and disease occurs.

FIGURE 2

Outline of plant–microbes/pathogens responses during their interactions and listing some of the important strategies to counter them. Plants as well as microbes/pathogens both faces challenges of each other during the battle and to better understand their interactions for effective outcome, different strategies needs to be implemented to address the problem of global food security.