Abstract
Plants regularly encounter abiotic constraints, and plant response to stress has been a focus of research for decades. Given increasing global temperatures and elevated atmospheric CO2 levels and the occurrence of water stress episodes driven by climate change, plant biochemistry, in particular, plant defence responses, may be altered significantly. Environmental factors also have a wider impact, shaping viral transmission processes that rely on a complex set of interactions between, at least, the pathogen, the vector, and the host plant. This review considers how abiotic stresses influence the transmission and spread of plant viruses by aphid vectors, mainly through changes in host physiology status, and summarizes the latest findings in this research field. The direct effects of climate change and severe weather events that impact the feeding behaviour of insect vectors as well as the major traits (e.g., within-host accumulation, disease severity and transmission) of viral plant pathogens are discussed. Finally, the intrinsic capacity of viruses to react to environmental cues in planta and how this may influence viral transmission efficiency is summarized. The clear interaction between biotic (virus) and abiotic stresses is a risk that must be accounted for when modelling virus epidemiology under scenarios of climate change.
Highlights
Transmission is a key step in the life cycle of a virus, allowing viral maintenance in an ecosystem.Most plant viruses rely on a third party for host–host spread, with sap-sucking insects from the order Hemiptera being by far the most widespread vectors [1,2]
Growth rates, plant physiological status, and biochemistry mediated by future climates are likely to have a major impact on insect vector biology, feeding behaviour and, the spread of viral disease
The unequivocal conclusion is that abiotic stresses can have a dramatic effect on viral transmission rates [48,53,54,55,57]
Summary
Transmission is a key step in the life cycle of a virus, allowing viral maintenance in an ecosystem. In the third category, designated circulative and propagative transmission, the virus completes a similar cycle within the vector’s body but replicates within the gut, the salivary glands, and sometimes other tissues of the insect before inoculation into a new host plant. These two latter modes of transmission are found mainly for phloem-limited viruses that are acquired and inoculated by insect vectors during long-lasting sap ingestion phases in sieve tubes (see [9] for review). A non-circulative transmitted virus, in contrast, should have no effect, or should attract but repel vectors, because its acquisition is fast and retention time extremely short [28,29,30]
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