Ecological processes and genetic variation are increasingly being integrated in coevolutionary models of plant-pathogen interactions, yet little progress has been made in relating this theoretical work to natural systems. This research will characterize the dynamics of the interaction between the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas viridiflava and the plant Arabidopsis thaliana by combining experimental and observational data with an evolutionary model. This will be one of only a few studies of natural plant-pathogen interactions and the first to study the dynamics of a bacterial pathogen in a wild plant population. A. thaliana has been a highly productive model system for studying plant resistance to pathogen infection in the laboratory and a growing amount of molecular evolutionary data is available for genes in A.thaliana that confer resistance to bacterial pathogens. By placing disease resistance in A. thaliana in an ecological and evolutionary context, this study will contribute to a greater understanding of recent molecular genetic results. A more complete understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of resistance in plant populations and virulence in pathogen populations, through studies such as this one, will be a necessary step towards the achievement of durable disease resistance in agricultural crops.
