Sheng Yang He
The first time I attended an IS-MPMI Congress was in 1990 (Interlaken, Switzerland), the year when IS-MPMI was formally inaugurated. It was such an exciting Congress, where major advances on rhizobia, agrobacteria, and various pathogens were reported. Research describing plant responses to microbial interactions was also accelerating. As a graduate student working on bacterial pathogenesis and looking for potential new projects for my future career, I was so inspired by talks by Fred Ausubel, Brian Staskawicz, and Jeff Dangl, who introduced the Arabidopsis-Pseudomonas syringae model for their study of defense responses. So, why am I reflecting on my experiences at this early IS-MPMI Congress? This is for two reasons. First, those who attended the IS-MPMI Congress in 2014 (Rhodes, Greece), you will recall that Fred Ausubel announced in his lecture that he would retire soon. In the months that followed his announcement, I realized that quite a large number of additional pioneering members of the MPMI community will be approaching retirement in the near future. This is going to have a huge impact on our society in terms of science, training, and personality. Starting soon on Interactions, Editor-in-Chief Brad Day will initiate a section in which interviews with retired members of our community will be featured. I encourage all members to read these interviews, as they should be very memorable, and moreover, will provide insight into what the leaders in our field see as the greatest accomplishments of their careers, what influenced their career choices and research foci, and where they see opportunities for future research
Second, when comparing the IS-MPMI Congress I first attended in 1990 to last year’s Congress in Rhodes, I felt that the 1990 Congress offered many more big ideas and research possibilities. This difference, of course, reflects the maturation of an exciting research field after three decades of intense research and is not indicative of the productivity of our community. In fact, in terms of productivity, we now publish many more papers as a community than at any given time in the past. Yet, I feel unsatisfied to witness young faculty members/group leaders struggle to find a new niche and establish a successful and competitive program. One might attribute the current struggles to many factors, including the difficult funding environment in most countries where our society members concentrate. What are the solutions? I would like to offer three here that, in my view, may be worthy of further discussion. First, we (especially the junior members of IS-MPMI) should develop a habit of challenging existing dogmas and model systems. In Rhodes and other places, I heard too many talks from our junior members who try to fit their results into current models. I think that even the authors of influential models would agree that many models are simplistic and should be challenged to make major conceptual advances in the field. Second, as we begin to understand basic principles of plant-microbe interactions under specific laboratory conditions, greater efforts are now needed to investigate plant-microbe interactions in the context of abiotic and biotic complexes as reflected in nature. For those who work on plant-pathogen interactions, the “disease triangle” dogma should be a familiar concept, as environmental conditions have huge effects on disease and resistance. What are the underlying molecular bases? Third, as a community, we must contribute substantially to the global efforts in translating fundamental knowledge to solving serious practical problems in agriculture. With many cutting-edge toolkits that were unthinkable even a few years ago, this is truly an exciting time for the IS-MPMI community to make a much greater impact in this area.
I am very proud of the collective talent of our society and look forward to hearing more paradigm-changing, holistic and/or great translational stories from you in our next Congress in Portland, Oregon, in 2016!