Hairy Roots to the Rescue
Developing solutions for diseases like potato zebra chip or citrus greening is challenging. It requires a ready supply of the pathogens, ideally in a laboratory setting, and being able to evaluate treatments faster.
Inspired by seminal work on mammalian virus culturing in animal/host tissues that led to the 1954 Nobel Prize in medicine, Texas A&M University AgriLife researchers and collaborators have successfully created a plant/host tissue system via hairy roots for culturing fastidious pathogens such as Candidatus Liberibacter spp. The hairy roots containing the pathogens can be produced on demand using host plant tissues and can be grown or maintained in laboratory growth chambers to provide a continuous supply of the pathogen.
The hairy root system also has the advantage of enabling high throughput screening of a variety of treatments such as resistance genes, genome-editing/CRISPR targets and antimicrobial chemicals to control Candidatus Liberibacter spp. Researchers were able to identify several potential treatments by screening hundreds of candidate therapies using this method in a fraction of the time it takes for traditional screening methods.
The researchers believe using the hairy root system to screen therapies will open new possibilities to fight several other devastating fastidious plant pathogens and threats.