Biotic stress

Biotic stress is stress that occurs as a result of damage done to plants by other living organisms, such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, beneficial and harmful insects, weeds, and cultivated or native plants. Not to be confused with abiotic stress, which is the negative impact of non-living factors on the organisms in a specific environment such as sunlight, wind, salinity, over watering and drought. The types of biotic stresses imposed on a plant depend on both geography and climate and on the host plant and its ability to resist particular stresses. Although there are many kinds of biotic stress, the majority of plant diseases are caused by fungi. Biotic stress remains a broadly defined term and those who study it face many challenges, such as the greater difficulty in controlling biotic stresses in an experimental context compared to abiotic stress.

The damage caused by these various living and nonliving agents can appear very similar. Even with close observation, accurate diagnosis can be difficult. For example, browning of leaves on an oak tree caused by drought stress may appear similar to leaf browning caused by oak wilt, a serious vascular disease, or the browning cause by anthracnose, a fairly minor leaf disease.

Agriculture

It is a major focus of agricultural research, due to the vast economic losses caused by biotic stress to cash crops. The relationship between biotic stress and plant yield affects economic decisions as well as practical development. The impact of biotic injury on crop yield impacts population dynamics, plant-stressor coevolution, and ecosystem nutrient cycling.

Biotic stress also impacts horticultural plant health and natural habitats ecology. It also has dramatic changes in the host recipient.Plants are exposed to many stress factors, such as drought, high salinity or pathogens, which reduce the yield of the cultivated plants or affect the quality of the harvested products. Arabidopsis thaliana is often used as a model plant to study the responses of plants to different sources of stress.

In History

Biotic stresses have had huge repercussions for humanity; an example of this is the potato blight, an oomycete which caused widespread famine in England, Ireland and Belgium in the 1840s. Another example is grape phylloxera coming from North America in the 19th century, which led to the Great French Wine Blight.

Today

Losses to pests and disease in crop plants continue to pose a significant threat to agriculture and food security. During the latter half of the 20th century, agriculture became increasingly reliant on synthetic chemical pesticides to provide control of pests and diseases, especially within the intensive farming systems common in the developed world. However, in the 21st century, this reliance on chemical control is becoming unsustainable. Pesticides tend to have a limited lifespan due to the emergence of resistance in the target pests, and are increasingly recognised in many cases to have negative impacts on biodiversity, and on the health of agricultural workers and even consumers.

Tomorrow

Due to the implications of climate change, it is suspected that plants will have increased susceptibility to pathogens. Additionally, elevated threat of abiotic stresses (i.e. drought and heat) are likely to contribute to plant pathogen susceptibility.

Effect on Plant Growth

Photosynthesis

Many biotic stresses affect photosynthesis, as chewing insects reduce leaf area and virus infections reduce the rate of photosynthesis per leaf area. Vascular- wilt fungi compromise the water transport and photosynthesis by inducing stomata closure.

Response to stress

Plants have co-evolved with their parasites for several hundred million years. This co-evolutionary process has resulted in the selection of a wide range of plant defences against microbial pathogens and herbivorous pests which act to minimise frequency and impact of attack. These defences include both physical and chemical adaptations, which may either be expressed constitutively, or in many cases, are activated only in response to attack. For example, utilization of high metal ion concentrations derived from the soil allow plants to reduce the harmful effects of biotic stressors (pathogens, herbivores etc.); meanwhile preventing the infliction of severe metal toxicity by way of safeguarding metal ion distribution throughout the plant with protective physiological pathways. Such induced resistance provides a mechanism whereby the costs of defence are avoided until defense is beneficial to the plant. At the same time, successful pests and pathogens have evolved mechanisms to overcome both constitutive and induced resistance in their particular host species. In order to fully understand and manipulate plant biotic stress resistance, we require a detailed knowledge of these interactions at a wide range of scales, from the molecular to the community level.

Cross Tolerance with Abiotic Stress

• Evidence shows that a plant undergoing multiple stresses, both abiotic and biotic (usually pathogen or herbivore attack), can produce a positive effect on plant performance, by reducing their susceptibility to biotic stress compared to how they respond to individual stresses. The interaction leads to a crosstalk between their respective hormone signalling pathways which will either induce or antagonize another restructuring genes machinery to increase tolerance of defense reactions.
• Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are key signalling molecules produced in response to biotic and abiotic stress cross tolerance. ROS are produced in response to biotic stresses during the oxidative burst.
• Dual stress imposed by ozone (O3) and pathogen affects tolerance of crop and leads to altered host pathogen interaction (Fuhrer, 2003). Alteration in pathogenesis potential of pest due to O3 exposure is of ecological and economical importance.
• Tolerance to both biotic and abiotic stresses has been achieved. In maize, breeding programmes have led to plants which are tolerant to drought and have additional resistance to the parasitic weed Striga hermonthica.

Remote Sensing

The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and various government agencies and private institutions have provided a great deal of fundamental information relating spectral reflectance and thermal emittance properties of soils and crops to their agronomic and biophysical characteristics. This knowledge has facilitated the development and use of various remote sensing methods for non-destructive monitoring of plant growth and development and for the detection of many environmental stresses that limit plant productivity. Coupled with rapid advances in computing and position locating technologies, remote sensing from ground-, air-, and space-based platforms is now capable of providing detailed spatial and temporal information on plant response to their local environment that is needed for site specific agricultural management approaches. This is very important in today’s society because with increasing pressure on global food productivity due to population increase, result in a demand for stress-tolerant crop varieties that has never been greater.

See also

• Abiotic stress, environment conditions
• Biotic component
• List of beneficial weeds