| Popis: |
Phloem sap feeding insect pests cause devastating agricultural losses with poorly understood mechanisms of plant defence responses to these insects leaving potentially environmentally damaging pesticides as the only protection. A striking feature of these pests is the characteristic pattern of how plants are colonised; i.e. by continuous manipulation of the hosts immune system until the point of successful phloem sap feeding. Plants respond to aphid feeding via a complex network of defence processes locally, i.e. in an entire leaf and systemically throughout the plant. How can we gain insights into these complex spatial and temporal processes to gain a better understanding of how plants respond to phloem sap feeding insects? With my work I show that by linking electrophysiological insect assays with recent progress in spatial transcriptomics, it is possible to unravel some of the features of Arabidopsis thaliana responses to Myzus persicae and, more generally, plant interactions with other invertebrate pests and microbial plant pathogens. |
