Persistence of obligate parasites in natural populations, with special reference to Arabidopsis and Tragopogon

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The persistence, natural abundance and epidemiology of obligate parasites is still hardly known. This is remarkable, considering the losses caused by some of these pathogens. During previous studies it could be shown that in some host species, the amount of asymptomatic infections was more than 20-fold higher than the amount of symptomatic infections. Some species could even only be detected by PCR and were never observed to cause symptoms. For the next period, it is envisaged to focus on investigating Brassicaceae and large scale studies on the occurrence of oomycete pathogens in natural populations of Arabidopsis thaliana shall be done. In addition the investigations into the ecology and epidemiology of Tragopogon endoparasites shall be continued. Tragopogon pratensis is parasitized by several biotrophic pathogens (two rusts, one white blister rust, one downy mildew, one anther rust) and is therefore perfectly suited for investigating the cryptic persistence and co-occurrence of these pathogens. Arabidopsis thaliana is of particular interest, as this model plant harbours three different species of obligate parasitic oomycetes, and the Arabidopsis downy mildew is about to become the most important obligate biotrophic model organism in plant pathology. The results gained by the work proposed will yield fundamental insight into the epidemiology and ecology of obligate parasites, be of considerable interest to the scientific community and constitute a solid foundation for future work related to this topic.