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Video Q&A ViewAttendees 3

Member Symposium

Highlighting Women's Research: Insect Adaptations to a Changing World On-Demand Presentations

Keeping up with the microbes: How insect vectors interact with emerging plant pathogens

On-Demand
On-Demand
Intensifications of agriculture, global trade, and climate change are driving unprecedented ecological changes and coinciding with the emergence of previously undocumented infectious diseases. However, we lack a mechanistic understanding of pathogen emergence, especially for pathogens that rely on arthropod vectors for transmission among crop plant hosts. These pathogens are responsible for billions of dollars in lost revenue annually and pose threats to native vegetation due to spillover from crops. However, efforts to identify emergence pathways and mechanisms are currently constrained by an intensive research focus on pathogen and vector ecology in domesticated crops without equal research on unmanaged systems. Although this focus reflects the need to manage disease in agriculture, it is clearly insufficient to understand how and why arthropod-borne microbes are increasingly emerging as devastating crop pathogens. In this presentation, I will discuss recent research from my laboratory on how emerging plant viruses and vector-borne bacterial plant pathogens in the genus Candidatus Liberibacter modify the behavior and biology of insect vectors in southwestern wild plant communities, as well as the consequences for vector persistence and spillover effects to agroecosystems.