Quantitative interactions: the disease outcome of Botrytis cinerea across the plant kingdom.

Botrytis cinerea is a fungal pathogen that causes necrotic disease on more than a thousand known hosts widely spread across the plant kingdom. How B. cinerea interacts with such extensive host diversity remains largely unknown.

Interactions of Tomato and Genetic Diversity: Parsing the Contributions of Host Differentiation, Domestication, and Pathogen Variation.

Although the impacts of crop domestication on specialist pathogens are well known, less is known about the interaction of crop variation and generalist pathogens. To study how genetic variation within a crop affects plant resistance to generalist pathogens, we infected a collection of wild and domesticated tomato accessions with a genetically diverse population of the generalist pathogen We quantified variation in lesion size of 97 genotypes (isolates) on six domesticated tomato genotypes () and six wild tomato genotypes (). Lesion size was significantly affected by large effects of the host and pathogen's genotype, with a much smaller contribution of domestication.

Digital Imaging Combined with Genome-Wide Association Mapping Links Loci to Plant-Pathogen Interaction Traits.

Plant resistance to generalist pathogens with broad host ranges, such as (), is typically quantitative and highly polygenic. Recent studies have begun to elucidate the molecular genetic basis of plant-pathogen interactions using commonly measured traits, including lesion size and/or pathogen biomass. However, with the advent of digital imaging and high-throughput phenomics, there are a large number of additional traits available to study quantitative resistance.