Abstract
BackgroundQuantitative traits are common in nature, but quantitative pathogenicity has received only little attention in phytopathology. In this study, we used 100 Fusarium culmorum isolates collected from natural field environments to assess their variation for two quantitative traits, aggressiveness and deoxynivalenol (DON) production on wheat plants grown in four different field environments (location-year combinations). Seventeen Fusarium graminearum pathogenicity candidate genes were assessed for their effect on the aggressiveness and DON production of F. culmorum under field conditions.ResultsFor both traits, genotypic variance among isolates was high and significant while the isolate-by-environment interaction was also significant, amounting to approximately half of the genotypic variance. Among the studied candidate genes, the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) HOG1 was found to be significantly associated with aggressiveness and deoxynivalenol (DON) production, explaining 10.29 and 6.05% of the genotypic variance, respectively.ConclusionsTo the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of a protein kinase regulator explaining differences in field aggressiveness and mycotoxin production among individuals from natural populations of a plant pathogen.
Highlights
Quantitative traits are common in nature, but quantitative pathogenicity has received only little attention in phytopathology
As we found high multi-colinearity among single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within the candidate genes, only one SNP out of a group of highly linked SNPs (HOG1–380) was used in the linear model to assess the proportion of explained genotypic variance [54]
Phenotypic data All F. culmorum isolates successfully produced symptoms on the inoculated wheat spikes and differences among isolates were observed at all environments
Summary
Quantitative traits are common in nature, but quantitative pathogenicity has received only little attention in phytopathology. We used 100 Fusarium culmorum isolates collected from natural field environments to assess their variation for two quantitative traits, aggressiveness and deoxynivalenol (DON) production on wheat plants grown in four different field environments (location-year combinations). Quantitative traits are a key feature in nature [1]. They are controlled by many genes, each contributing with a small effect to the overall phenotypic expression of a trait. Quantitative traits of pathogenicity have received only little attention in fungal biology [2, 3]. Association mapping employing mixed models is a common method to dissect the genetic architecture of quantitative traits. Designed for the analysis of human diseases, association mapping is extensively used in plant genetic research [4] either as genome-wide association study (GWAS) using
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