A snapshot of molecular plant-microbe interaction research.

Abstract

Plants and microbes are in a continuous arms race to maintain their predominance within their particular niche. Understanding the complexity of these plant–microbe interactions is of utmost importance as it can provide new insights into the mechanisms mediating disease processes and in turn inspire new plant breeding strategies. The International Society for Molecular Plant–Microbe Interactions (IS-MPMI) invited scientists from around the world to share their findings during the XVI International Congress on Molecular Plant–Microbe Interactions, which was held on the beautiful island of Rhodes in Greece (Fig. 1). The congress was organized by the Agricultural University of Athens, the Hellenic Phytopathology Society, and the Hellenic Society of Phytiatry and provided over 1100 participants from 55 countries with the opportunity to present and discuss their current and future research. A great number of talks and posters were presented, however our aim within this report is to provide a snapshot of the discipline by focusing on just some of the exciting research and discussions which took place. The key topics discussed were virulence factors, epigenetic regulation, hormones, symbiosis factors, toxins, signaling pathways, microbe recognition, immunity, and pathogen diagnostics. Effector biology was also a recurrent theme in many plenary and concurrent sessions, indicating the importance of a topic that was also highlighted recently by a Virtual Special Issue in New Phytologist (see Kuhn & Panstruga, 2014). In addition to this, throughout the meeting next generation sequencing (NGS) techniques were described and shown to be shedding new light on long-standing issues in microbial ecology.