RESEARCH
Mitigating
Plant Pandemics I
t’s not easy for anyone to navigate the pandemic these days, let alone a 5.7 earthquake and then hurricane-force winds that uprooted thousands of trees in Salt Lake Valley.
Harder still when you’ve been tapped in Germany to be a new faculty member in the School of Biological Sciences… and you have a lab to launch. Such was the case last year when Talia Karasov, an evolutionary geneticist who studies plant-microbe interactions at the Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen Germany, found herself on an airplane headed to Salt Lake City. She is part of a recent innovative hiring cluster at the University of Utah in which multiple, related academic units come together to hire researchers who study related topics in evolutionary biology.
For Karasov, “going boldly where no one has gone before” is decidedly earthbound. 2
Karasov made it safely, masked and sociallydistanced, to Utah and began setting up her lab—similar to launching a startup. It’s been a whirlwind execution. Fortunately, her dog “Laika,” named after another famous traveling dog (the first to orbit earth… on the Russians’ Sputnik), has been there all along as a steadying force. Traversing new frontiers is in the family, apparently. For Karasov, though, “going boldly where no one has gone before” is decidedly earthbound… through flora and its pathogens. Plant pathogens pose a huge problem for food security around the globe. Annually, plant pests—including microbes and insects—are responsible for 20–40% loss in agricultural yield. Decades of research on pathogen resistance has led to great success in identifying, developing and deploying pathogen-resistant crop varieties. Unfortunately, pathogens often evolve quickly to overcome these resistance traits. A common pattern has emerged in which a single genotype of pathogen evolves to circumvent resistance, and spreads widely to other populations and then globally. Once the pathogen evolves to circumvent resistance, the cycle begins anew. It’s hard if not impossible to keep up with these arms races in various cash crops, especially when the cycle of resistance/counter-resistance can happen within a few years. This boom-bust cycle may not be inevitable, however. Indeed, anecdotal evidence from wild plant systems suggests that many (if not most) wild plants are less likely to suffer epidemics. In her research of plant-pathogen interactions Karasov studies non-agricultural plant systems to understand which factors
