Host-Parasite Interaction
Hardwood vascular wilt diseases are characterized by blockage of the tree's water-conducting vessels by either the physical presence of the pathogen (mycelium and spores), or through the host's own response to infection. Oak trees, in response to wounding or infection often produce tyloses, balloon-like outgrowths of the vessels' cell walls that can function to wall-off pathogens and prevent infections from spreading. Red oaks appear to lack a host-response mechanism that restricts the pathogen's movement, and infection usually kills the tree by wilting the entire crown. White oaks, which produce tyloses more quickly and in greater numbers, are more resistant to the disease, though the exact mechanism for this resistance is unknown.
Read more about this topic: Oak Wilt
Famous quotes containing the word interaction:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)