Abstract
This article is part of the Top 10 Unanswered Questions in MPMI invited review series.The past few decades have seen major discoveries in the field of molecular plant-microbe interactions. As the result of technological and intellectual advances, we are now able to answer questions at a level of mechanistic detail that we could not have imagined possible 20 years ago. The MPMI Editorial Board felt it was time to take stock and reassess. What big questions remain unanswered? We knew that to identify the fundamental, overarching questions that drive our research, we needed to do this as a community. To reach a diverse audience of people with different backgrounds and perspectives, working in different areas of plant-microbe interactions, we queried the more than 1,400 participants at the 2019 International Congress on Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions meeting in Glasgow. This group effort resulted in a list of ten, broad-reaching, fundamental questions that influence and inform our research. Here, we introduce these Top 10 unanswered questions, giving context and a brief description of the issues. Each of these questions will be the subject of a detailed review in the coming months. We hope that this process of reflecting on what is known and unknown and identifying the themes that underlie our research will provide a framework to use going forward, giving newcomers a sense of the mystery of the big questions and inspiring new avenues and novel insights.[Formula: see text] Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY 4.0 International license.
Highlights
How will abiotic stresses affect other plant-microbe interactions? How do plant-microbe interactions affect host response to abiotic stress? When we extend this line of questioning to consider nonbinary interactions, the questions multiply
MAMP-triggered immunity (MTI) and effector-triggered immunity (ETI) were originally identified during the study of plant disease, microbial production of effectors to manipulate the host plant appears to be a general feature of plant-microbe interactions and plays important roles in symbiotic interactions (Wang et al 2018) as well as pathogenic
The quest to identify the big, unanswered questions in molecular plant-microbe interactions, initiated by the MPMI editorial board, resulted in a list of ten, broad-reaching, fundamental questions that influence and inform our research. This list of questions helps crystallize some of the big issues facing the field of MPMI, framing them in a way that draws different research areas together
Summary
What are the Top 10 Unanswered Questions in Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions?. Jeanne M. The past few decades have seen tremendous technical advances in the form of incredibly finescale expression analyses, quantitative biochemical and cell biology-based studies, high-throughput phenotyping of roots and shoots, including single cell analyses, and the development of sensitive methods to detect and localize metabolites and metals within both plants and microbes, that have made it possible to address questions we have not been able to before Powerful genetic tools, such as CRISPR, paired with wholegenome sequencing and expression analysis, means that the genomes of both plants and their associated microbes are readily accessible and insights that would previously have taken years can take days or months. In view of rapid technological advances and important new discoveries paired with the sobering prospect of a rapidly changing planet, we felt that the moment to do this was
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