28 February 2026
Sandra V. Gomez-Gutierrez, Unnati Sonawala - Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions, 2026
Aphids are small, sap-feeding insects found worldwide, yet their impact on agriculture is anything but small. Aphids feed by inserting needle-like mouthparts into the vascular tissue of the plant, where they tap directly into nutrient-rich sap. In doing so, they divert plant resources and disrupt normal nutrient flow (Carolan et al. 2011; Nalam et al. 2019). Beyond the damage they inflict through feeding, aphids are insect vectors of nearly one-third of all known plant viruses (Jayasinghe et al. 2022), making them a serious and persistent threat to global food production. Remarkably, aphids do not feed passively: during feeding, they inject saliva containing specialized proteins, called effectors, that help them evade or suppress plant defense responses, allowing them to establish long-term feeding sites (Carolan et al. 2011). However, our understanding of virulence and avirulence factors in aphids is limited.
Controlling aphid infestations has become increasingly difficult as many species have evolved resistance to widely used insecticides (Nalam et al. 2019). This has shifted crop protection strategies toward developing aphid-resistant plant varieties (Gebretsadik et al. 2025), underscoring the need to understand how aphids manipulate, and sometimes fail to evade, plant immune defenses. Although some aphid salivary proteins are known to trigger plant defense responses, how individual effectors interact with plant immune components to elicit virulence or avirulence remains poorly understood, and many aphid effectors are still functionally uncharacterized.
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