The Five Senses: How Do Plant Pathogens Know They Found Their Host?

All pathogens must sense that they have arrived at their host. This is a necessary part of infection in order to effect the changes in pathogen biology required to progress through their life cycle. How the information that they have arrived is transmitted, and what molecules/media convey the information, is poorly understood. Here, we review recent literature and provide speculation as to how this might happen, by analogy to the five human senses. Our criteria center on natural selection: we consider host-derived signals-in the broadest sense-to be those that carry some information and that can be detected by the pathogen, in principle. For each, we identify supporting literature and speculate on areas of possible expansion. We conclude, on the one hand, that there is a diversity of understudied but compelling signals, but, on the other hand, that not all signals are equal. The magnitude of the response is likely a function of the fidelity of the signal/detection. Although knowledge is currently incomplete, the prospect of understanding perception of arrival at the host may allow us to perturb pathogen perception of the host and thereby thwart this early and fundamental step in pathogen development. [Formula: see text] Copyright © 2026 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY 4.0 International license.