Kayleigh R O’Keeffe, Ignazio Carbone, Corbin D Jones, and Charles E. Mitchell were published in the August 2017 issue of Current Opinion in Plant Biology with the paper, "Plastic potential: how the phenotypes and adaptations of pathogens are influenced by microbial interactions within plants."
Predicting the effects of plant-associated microbes on emergence, spread, and evolution of plant pathogens demands an understanding of how pathogens respond to these microbes at two levels of biological organization: that of an individual pathogen and that of a pathogen population across multiple individual plants. We first examine the plastic responses of individual plant pathogens to microbes within a shared host, as seen through changes in pathogen growth and multiplication. We then explore the limited understanding of how within-plant microbial interactions affect pathogen populations and discuss the need to incorporate population-level observations with population genomic techniques. Finally, we suggest that integrating across levels will further our understanding of the ecological and evolutionary impacts of within-plant microbial interactions on pathogens.