PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Caseys, Celine
AU  - Shi, Gongjun
AU  - Soltis, Nicole
AU  - Gwinner, Raoni
AU  - Corwin, Jason
AU  - Atwell, Susanna
AU  - Kliebenstein, Daniel
TI  - A generalist pathogen view of diverse host evolutionary histories through polygenic virulence
AID  - 10.1101/507491
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 507491
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/06/25/507491.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/06/25/507491.full
AB  - Host-pathogen interactions display a continuum of host ranges from extreme specialists limited to single hosts to broad generalists with hundreds of hosts. However, the existing models for host-pathogen dynamics are dominated by observations derived from specialist pathogens with qualitative virulence and tight host-pathogen co-evolution. It is not clear how appropriate the co-evolutionary model is in generalist pathogens that present quantitative virulence and broad host specificity. We infected 98 strains of the generalist necrotroph fungus Botrytis cinerea on 90 genotypes representing eight plant species with wild and domestic lines. We show that plant-Botrytis interactions don’t fit traditional co-evolution models as Botrytis interacts with the Eudicot species individually, with little link to the relatedness between plant species or plant domestication. Furthermore, Botrytis host specificity and virulence have distinct polygenic architectures suggesting that the evolution of the Eudicot/Botrytis interactions relies on genome-wide allelic diversity rather than few major virulence loci.