Biology Seminar | Professor Fumiaki Katagiri, University of Minnesota | How can plants stay in this world while their pathogens can evolve much faster?

Many plant pathogens are microbial and can evolve much faster than plants. How can plants stay in this race of evolution against pathogens with lopsided disadvantage? An answer is that plants hide and change the goal of the race instead of fairly competing in the race. I will discuss two of the mechanisms with which plants hide and change the goal: resilience of the immune signaling network and coevolution of homologous immune regulators. I will also discuss how plants limit the battlegrounds using these mechanisms.