Understanding the factors that contribute to the emergence and spread of fungal and oomycete pathogens is essential to ensuring food security worldwide.
Much like the process by which a susceptible individual becomes infected in a traditional Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model, disease occurrence in plants requires the interaction of a virulent pathogen with a susceptible host. A number of permissive conditions influence the transition of an individual plant from the susceptible state to the infected state, including environmental permissiveness (e.g., climate, temperature, and soil nutrient content), pathogen presence and virulence (e.g., genome architecture, population size, and life cycle speed), and host presence and susceptibility (e.g., abiotic stresses, plant health, and resistance genes). These factors may all change over time [Fones 2020, Singh 2023].
In this project we aim to examine how heterogeneous mathematical models and data across molecular, within-plant, local-population, and regional-scales can be integrated to identify the mechanisms and tipping points through which an isolated infection becomes a large-scale epidemic.