Abstract
Plant diseases are an important constraint on worldwide crop production, accounting for losses of 10–30% of the global harvest each year [1]. As a consequence, crop diseases represent a significant threat to ensuring global food security. To feed the growing human population it will be necessary to double food production by 2050, which will require the sustainable intensification of world agriculture in an era of unpredictable climate change [2],[3]. Controlling the most important plant diseases represents one of the best means of delivering as much of the current productivity of crops as possible. To accomplish this task, a fundamental understanding of the biology of plant infection by disease-causing agents, such as viruses, bacteria, and fungi will be necessary [1],[2].
Highlights
Plant diseases are an important constraint on worldwide crop production, accounting for losses of 10–30% of the global harvest each year [1]
Biotrophic pathogens are parasites that have evolved the means to grow within living plant cells without stimulating plant defence mechanisms [6]
It is clear from analysing the genome sequences of both plant pathogenic and free-living fungi that they possess large numbers of extracellular enzymes and transporterencoding genes, as might be expected, extracellular enzymes appear more restricted in number in biotrophic species
Summary
Plant diseases are an important constraint on worldwide crop production, accounting for losses of 10–30% of the global harvest each year [1]. A study published in this issue of PLoS Biology [15] provides a significant advance in understanding the mechanism by which a plant pathogenic fungus is able to acquire nutrients in planta.
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