Protection against the “zombification” of plants might be possible with new research into parasitic bacteria that cause phytoplasma infections, a problem that has long vexed researchers and poses a serious threat to food crops.
An international effort involving Academia Sinica researchers was published on Sept. 30 in the journal Cell — and was featured on the front cover — exploring the molecular underpinnings of phytoplasma infection in plants.
The parasitic microbes hijack a plant’s growth, slowing the aging process and halting reproduction as they become “zombies,” living only to serve the bacteria.
Photo courtesy of Academia Sinica’s Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology
An infection is commonly expressed in a proliferation of bushy leaves and “witches’ broom” shoots, but many other symptoms are possible, ranging from yellowing leaves to death.
Transmitted mainly by insects, phytoplasmas can infect a wide range of plant species, with the danger in Taiwan being to scallions, luffa and peanuts.
There is no known cure for an existing infection, said Academia Sinica Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology associate researcher Kuo Chih-horng (郭志鴻), who worked on the study alongside the John Innes Centre and Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, England, and the Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands.
Insecticides can kill the disease vectors, but they do their own harm to the environment, Kuo said.
Researchers have spent decades trying to find a solution, but their efforts have been complicated by the resistance of phytoplasmas to artificial laboratory cultivation without a host cell, he said.
To get around this problem, the researchers avoided traditional culturing, instead directly investigating interactions between bacterial pathogenic traits and plant proteins, Kuo said.
The key to their findings is SAP05, a bacterial protein that hijacks the process by which a plant breaks down unneeded proteins.
They discovered that SAP05 causes a plant’s protein destruction mechanism to essentially mislabel its growth proteins and throw them away, halting development.
Although the growth proteins are similar to those in animals, the researchers found that SAP05 has no effect on the insects that carry phytoplasmas between plants.
This discovery led the team to discover the two amino acids in RPN10, a plant protein receptor that interacts with SAP05.
By replacing the two amino acids with their equivalents in insects, the bacteria were prevented from hijacking the process.
This suggests that gene editing techniques targeting just these two amino acids might make plants more resistant to phytoplasma infections.
Creating resistance with such a small genetic change is a huge breakthrough, Kuo said, adding that the findings might build resistance in a variety of crops and reduce the need for pesticides.
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