Navigating Host Immunity and Concurrent Ozone Stress: Strain-Resolved Metagenomics Reveals Maintenance of Intraspecific Diversity and Genetic Variation in on Pepper.

The evolving threat of new pathogen variants in the face of global environmental changes poses a risk to a sustainable crop production. Predicting and responding to how climate change affects plant-pathosystems is challenging, as environment affects host-pathogen interactions from molecular to the community level, and with eco-evolutionary feedbacks at play. To address this knowledge gap, we studied short-term within-host eco-evolutionary changes in the pathogen, , on resistant and susceptible pepper in the open-top chambers (OTCs) under elevated Ozone (O) conditions in a single growing season.