A tradeoff between tolerance and resistance to a major fungal pathogen in elite wheat cultivars

What is it about?

Plants can use two strategies to cope with pathogens: resistance and tolerance. While resistant plants suppress the pathogen directly, tolerant plants are able to reduce the damage induced by the pathogen without suppressing it directly. We discovered a new component of tolerance of wheat to one of its most damaging pathogens, Zymoseptoria tritici. This was possible because of an exceptionally large dataset that we collected by analyzing digital images of 11,152 infected leaves belonging to 335 different wheat varieties. We found that more tolerant wheat varieties were on average less resistant and vice versa, more resistant wheat varieties were on average less tolerant. We present the first compelling evidence of this type of tradeoff in a plant-pathogen system.

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