RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 A generalist pathogen view of diverse host evolutionary histories through polygenic virulence JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 507491 DO 10.1101/507491 A1 Caseys, Celine A1 Shi, Gongjun A1 Soltis, Nicole A1 Gwinner, Raoni A1 Corwin, Jason A1 Atwell, Susanna A1 Kliebenstein, Daniel YR 2019 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/06/25/507491.abstract 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.