FASTIDIOUS PLANT PATHOGENS
Fastidious microorganisms are have complex nutritional requirements, many of them have not been cultivated to date and can only be grown in their natural hosts. In fact, many of the fastidious plant pathogens are obligate, intracellular pathogens residing exclusively inside host cells. This makes them very different from most bacterial plant pathogens, which colonizes the intercellular spaces of plant tissues. Typically these bacteria are transmitted from one plant to another by an insect vector, their second host. This is quite similar to some human, insect-delivered diseases such as Malaria, Lyme disease, Leishmaniasis and more. These bacteria are the cause for some of the most devastating diseases the world's agriculture had suffered in recent years. Two outstanding examples are the Huanglongbing disease which practically destroys the citrus industry in Florida and the olive quick decline syndrome in southern Italy which led to the death and uprooting of millions of olive trees, some of which are centuries old. Both of these diseases are caused by insect-borne fastidious bacteria, to which no efficient management tools currently exist.
For these reasons (and more), we find these microbes extremely interesting.
We seek to understand how fastidious plant pathogens adapt to the two different niches they colonise, plant cell (kingdom: Plantae) and an insect cells (kingdom: Animalia). These are two quite different environments to which this bacterium has adapted. An impressive ability indeed…
