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Published on: August 4, 2018
Evolution of Compatibility Range in the Rice-Magnaporthe oryzae System: An Uneven Distribution of R Genes Between
Romain Gallet1, Colin Fontaine1, François Bonnot1
1First and eighth authors: INRA, UMR BGPI, F-34398 Montpellier, France; second author: Centre d'Ecologie et des Sciences de la Conservation-UMR 7204, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris, France; third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and ninth authors: CIRAD, UMR BGPI, F-34398 Montpellier, France; and seventh author: CIRAD, UMR PVBMT, F-97410 Saint-Pierre, France.
Abstract:
Efficient strategies for limiting the impact of pathogens on crops require a good understanding of the factors underlying the evolution of compatibility range for the pathogens and host plants, i.e., the set of host genotypes that a particular pathogen genotype can infect and the set of pathogen genotypes that can infect a particular host genotype. Until now, little is known about the evolutionary and ecological factors driving compatibility ranges in systems implicating crop plants. We studied the evolution of host and pathogen compatibility ranges for rice blast disease, which is caused by the ascomycete Magnaporthe oryzae. We challenged 61 rice varieties from three rice subspecies with 31 strains of M. oryzae collected worldwide from all major known genetic groups. We determined the compatibility range of each plant variety and pathogen genotype and the severity of each plant-pathogen interaction. Compatibility ranges differed between rice subspecies, with the most resistant subspecies selecting for pathogens with broader compatibility ranges and the least resistant subspecies selecting for pathogens with narrower compatibility ranges. These results are consistent with a nested distribution of R genes between rice subspecies.
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