Abstract
Plant-pathogen interactions are largely modeled as co-evolutionary arms races based on specialist pathogens. Less is known about how generalist pathogens interact with diverse hosts. Here, we use a collection of 98 isolates of Botrytis cinerea to address how this generalist necrotroph perceive plant evolution across 90 plant genotypes from eight Eudicot species. We show that interactions in this pathosystem are largely defined by the plant species with small and inconsistent effect of plant domestication. More surprisingly, plant susceptibility to Botrytis shows little association to evolutionary distances between the plant species. We also show that Botrytis virulence and host specificity is polygenic with GWA associated genes covering 12% of Botrytis gene transcript.
