Can inherited memories of stress help protect crops from pests and disease?

Stevenson, Dominic and Roberts, Mike (2025) Can inherited memories of stress help protect crops from pests and disease? PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Since their development in the 1940s, synthetic pesticides have been a vital tool in combatting crop losses to pests and pathogens. However, growers are being encouraged to move towards alternative pest control methods due to concerns about the effects of pesticides on the environment. Priming, the potentiation of plants’ natural defences, is one such alternative to chemical pesticides. The primed state can also be inherited from parent plants to their offspring. If transgenerational priming were implemented commercially, this may ease the introduction of priming into pest control by reducing the input required by growers. We tested the effects of five parental priming treatments: β-aminobutryic acid (BABA), benzo(1,2,3)thiadiazole-7-carbothioic acid S-methyl ester (BTH), methyl jasmonate (MeJA), hexanoic acid (HA), and Fytosave, on the resistance of offspring Micro Tom tomato plants to Pseudomonas syringae or Botrytis cinerea. We also tested whether any of our treatments could transgenerationally influence the expression of PATHOGENESIS RELATED PROTEIN-1 (PR-1). BABA, BTH, and Fytosave could all provide transgenerational resistance against P. syringae. None of our treatments could produce any consistent transgenerational effects on resistance against B. cinerea, however they could all transgenerationally potentiate expression of PR-1 upon treatment with 2,6-dichloroisonicotinic acid (INA). Additionally, we tested if parental treatment with our elicitors would influence growth of the offspring. Each of our treatments could affect growth of offspring plants, however the exact effect of parental treatment differed between elicitors. We conclude that Fytosave may be a suitable candidate for commercial application of transgenerational priming in tomato crops as it appears to be capable of transgenerationally priming the salicylic acid defence pathway against biotrophic pathogens without negatively affecting fruit yield.