Illuminating Plant Disease: Tracking Bacterial Infection in Living Plants

Diseases of plants threaten crop productivity and food security worldwide. One such pathogen is Xanthomonas vasicola, a bacterium that causes leaf streak disease in economically important crops. Despite its agricultural significance, we do not fully understand how this pathogen colonizes plant tissues, which cells it targets, or how plants immune system responds to infection.
This project will use glowing biological markers to visualize both bacterial colonization and plant responses during disease development. Students will engineer bacteria to produce light signals using genes derived from naturally light-producing organisms, such as green fluorescent protein from jellyfish and luciferase from fireflies for bioluminescence. These glowing bacteria will then be used to infect plants and track infection within living plant tissues over time and at different resolutions.
Using bacteria labeled with luciferase, students will first visualize whole plants to monitor the progression of infection throughout disease development by detecting bioluminescence. Next, using confocal microscopy, students will examine tissues infected with fluorescently labeled bacteria at higher resolution to determine where bacteria accumulate and identify the plant cell types most affected during infection.
Finally, to understand how individual plant cells respond to infection at the subcellular level, students will investigate proteins used by bacteria to alter the behavior of plant cells during disease. These bacterial proteins will be fluorescently labeled, expressed in plant tissues, and visualized using confocal microscopy to determine where they accumulate inside cells and which cellular processes they target during infection.
The project integrates molecular biology, microbiology, plant biology, and advanced bioimaging to address fundamental questions in plant biology and innate immunity. Students will participate in creating engineered microbial pathogens, conducting plant infection experiments, collecting imaging data, quantifying biological responses, and analyzing results. No prior research experience is required. As active contributors to an ongoing research program, students will generate original data that address unanswered questions in plant disease biology and contribute to the broader scientific understanding of how plants and pathogens interact. By the end of the program, participants will have produced datasets suitable for presentation at the Symposium of Student Scholars and that may contribute to future scientific publications and externally funded research projects.