The Impact of Microbes in Plant Immunity and Priming Induced Inheritance: A Sustainable Approach for Crop protection

Food security has become the most challenging task in the current scenario of population growth and the future perspective in the everchanging environment. Cultivation and management of plants is now a major challenge for modern food production, which is further compounded by the lack of common background among many disease control disciplines. All crop plants simultaneously engage with billions of microbes from their surroundings, most of which are harmless and rather beneficial to the plant as they promote plant growth and provide protection in opposition to diseases. However, a few species-specific adapted microbes cause diseases with devastating effects on crop yields. To prevent pathogen infection, plants have evolved an innate immune system that recognises conserved cell surface molecules that most pathogen species possess. Activation of the plant immune system ceases the non-adapted pathogen invasion, but this comes with a fitness cost that significantly reduces plant growth and leads to a yield penalty. Apart from their innate immune systems controlling pre-programmed defence reactions, plants can also increase the responsiveness of their immune systems in response to selected environmental signals. This phenomenon is known as "defence priming". The fitness costs of priming are lower than those of constitutively activated defences, suggesting that priming functions as an ecological adaptation of the plant to respond faster to a hostile environment. Although defence priming rarely provides full protection, its broad spectrum effectiveness, long-lasting durability, and inheritance to future generations make it attractive for integrated disease management.