28 February 2022 16:00 CET - - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Which processes shape phytoplasma-insect-plant relationships?

Valeria Trivellone

Prairie Research Institute, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign  https://directory.illinois.edu/detail?userId=valeria3@illinois.edu&widgetId=15

The contemporary crisis of emerging disease (both of plant and human concerns) has been a century and a half in the making. Human, veterinary, and crop health practitioners convinced themselves that diseases can be controlled by using the classical epidemiological approach. Rarely, if never, evolutionary and ecological approaches are used to predict new host-pathogen associations and the emergence of diseases. Unfortunately, none of these traditional perspectives anticipated the onslaught of emerging infectious diseases confronting humanity today. An integrative and modern approach is necessary to explain and predict the outbreaks of known and emerging pathogens. In this seminar, I will use a group a vector-borne plant pathogens to show that inconsistencies in the standard model to investigate host-pathogen associations generate the so called "Parasite Paradox", and that it can be solved using the Stockholm Paradigm.