Submitted by ra3_14 t3_y5xlef in askscience
I was walking on the street when I saw two guys in high Vis coats injecting a tree with something. When I asked them, they told me they were vaccinating the tree. I never realised that plants could be vaccinated or that they had something like an immune system.
Could someone knowledgeable on this explain how the vaccine works, what kind of vaccines are available and for what plants and what they can protect against, and how long they last?
Ah that makes sense. It's still interesting that you have to inject a bactericide or fungicide for it to spread well.
I found this article and assumed that it was a vaccine, but actually reading it, it seems more like what you described.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16021641-100-a-jab-for-trees/
So compared to vaccines where your body would generate the antibodies. This is kinda like just placing antibodies everywhere inside the tree, with the tree being passive in all this?
No, it's actually a vaccine. Plants have immune systems that are in some way analogous to ours, although because they have much different biology the details are not the same.
However, in this case the vaccine works like a vaccine would in a human: a non-virulent strain of a potential pathogen (here a fungus) is injected into the tree, causing the tree to develop an immune response to the similar-enough pathogenic fungus, which allows the tree to resist infection from that fungus.
I am unaware of any adaptive immune responses in plants (ie what a vaccine would work on). There are some attempts to prime the innate immune responses in order to illicit a stronger response, but that is not a vaccine.
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that article does say there's "acquired resistance" and "immune memory" in plants, though clearly with a completely mechanism compared to mammals. It's right there in the "Key Points" summary
In addition to acting through a different mechanism, it also has a slightly different function from mammalian immune memory. Systemic Acquired Resistance is first and foremost a method of raising the immune response throughout the plant in response to a local infection. This is predicated on the fact that plants grow in a modular, only semi-deterministic manner with different organs living relatively independently of each other (at least compared to how most animals' bodies work) and the fact that they don't have a circulatory system that rapidly transports substances between organs.
Such a system wouldn't be useful in mammals, because a pathogen in the bloodstream is going to travel just as fast as any endogenous signal, and (since mammals are motile) an infection at one location in the body is unlikely to be followed by a subsequent infection at another location. In contrast, sessile organisms beset by e.g. a fungal pathogen can expect to be infected at multiple locations over a fairly short period of time.
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do you know what you are talking about? nothing in this article states anything related to how vaccines works in us. as far as I remember plants have some genes that can detect pathogens and elicit some immune response, but it's not adaptive as in us mammals. pls don't spread misinformation after skimming over a Wikipedia article
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Very rare to find a tree treatment that does modify the tree or change the tree.
Plants are poor at excreting or breaking down chemicals once they enter the plant circulatory system.
Mostly what you see is systemic insecticides/fungicides that are essentially bug spray that is floating around throughout the plant until something eats it, or the chemical gets stuck in plant tissue that falls off the tree.
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I get the pine trees in my yard "vaccinated". They inject a protein or something that kills and prevents processionary caterpillars. These caterpillars produce strong allergic reactions and can be fatal to dogs. I have not seen one caterpillar since we do this and the dog can roam around happily ☺️
Eomycota t1_isn2g6w wrote
I think he over simplified what he was doing, but it was most likely some sort of fungicide or bactericide. The only case I know where it is commonly use is for ash dieback, a fungus transmitted by the emerald ash borer. It's a good way to make sure it is transmitted through all the tree's system.