The hidden treasures of citrus: finding Huanglongbing cure where it was lost

Huanglongbing (HLB), a deadly citrus disease which has significantly downsized the entire industry worldwide. The intractable and incurable disease has brought the citriculture an enormous loss of productivity. With no resistant varieties available, failure of chemical treatments despite repeated applications, and hazardous consequences to environmental health, have led to large-scale research to find a sustainable cure. Inside plants, the key determinants of health and safety, live the endophytic microbes. Endophytes possess unrivaled plant benefiting properties. The progression of HLB is known to cause disturbance in endophytic bacterial communities. Given the importance of the plant endophytic microbiome in disease progression, the notion of engineering microbiomes through indigenous endophytes is attracting scientific attention which is considered revolutionary as it precludes the incompatibility concerns associated with the use of alien (microbes from other plant species) endophytes. In this review, we briefly discuss the transformation of the plant-pathogen-environment to the plant-pathogen-microbial system in a disease triangle. We also argue the employment of indigenous endophytes isolated from a healthy state to engineer the diseased citrus endophytic microbiomes that can provide sustainable solution for vascular pathogens. We evaluated the plethora of microbiomes responses to the re-introduction of endophytes which leads to disease resistance in the citrus host. The idea is not merely confined to citrus-HLB, but it is globally applicable for tailoring a customized cure for general plant-pathogen systems particularly for the diseases caused by the vascular system-restricted pathogens.