Divergent abiotic spectral pathways unravel pathogen stress signals across species.

Abstract

Plant pathogens pose increasing threats to global food security, causing yield losses that exceed 30% in food-deficit regions. Xylella fastidiosa (Xf) represents the major transboundary plant pest and one of the world's most damaging pathogens in terms of socioeconomic impact. Spectral screening methods are critical to detect non-visual symptoms of early infection and prevent spread. However, the subtle pathogen-induced physiological alterations that are spectrally detectable are entangled with the dynamics of abiotic stresses. Here, using airborne spectroscopy and thermal scanning of areas covering more than one million trees of different species, infections and water stress levels, we reveal the existence of divergent pathogen- and host-specific spectral pathways that can disentangle biotic-induced symptoms. We demonstrate that uncoupling this biotic-abiotic spectral dynamics diminishes the uncertainty in the Xf detection to below 6% across different hosts. Assessing these deviating pathways against another harmful vascular pathogen that produces analogous symptoms, Verticillium dahliae, the divergent routes remained pathogen- and host-specific, revealing detection accuracies exceeding 92% across pathosystems. These urgently needed hyperspectral methods advance early detection of devastating pathogens to reduce the billions in crop losses worldwide.

Plant phenotyping relevance

航空分光法と熱スキャンを用いて植物病原体感染を非視覚的な生理・スペクトル形質として検出し、複数病原体・宿主で精度を検証しており、表現型取得手法が研究の中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's data availability and code availability statements point to a public GitHub repository (HyperSens/HyperSens-Divergent-spectral-responses-Nature-Communications) with a Zenodo DOI (10.5281/zenodo.5535095) containing the study's spectral trait datasets and analysis code. The large airborne hyperspectral imagec