Abstract
Climate change and pesticide resistance are two of the most imminent challenges human society is facing today. Knowledge of how the evolution of pesticide resistance may be affected by climate change such as increasing air temperature on the planet is important for agricultural production and ecological sustainability in the future but is lack in scientific literatures reported from empirical research. Here, we used the azoxystrobin‐Phytophthora infestans interaction in agricultural systems to investigate the contributions of environmental temperature to the evolution of pesticide resistance and infer the impacts of global warming on pesticide efficacy and future agricultural production and ecological sustainability. We achieved this by comparing azoxystrobin sensitivity of 180 P. infestans isolates sampled from nine geographic locations in China under five temperature schemes ranging from 13 to 25°C. We found that local air temperature contributed greatly to the difference of azoxystrobin tolerance among geographic populations of the pathogen. Both among‐population and within‐population variations in azoxystrobin tolerance increased as experimental temperatures increased. We also found that isolates with higher azoxystrobin tolerance adapted to a broader thermal niche. These results suggest that global warming may enhance the risk of developing pesticide resistance in plant pathogens and highlight the increased challenges of administering pesticides for effective management of plant diseases to support agricultural production and ecological sustainability under future thermal conditions.
Highlights
Continuing evolutionary processes in pathogens can quickly reduce the efficacy of all classes of pesticides after they are commercially adopted for a certain period of time, thereby presenting a great threat to plant disease management in both agricultural and natural ecosystems
The temperature-mediated evolution of pesticide tolerance was investigated in the Irish famine pathogen P. infestans using a common garden approach (Yang et al, 2016; Zhan & McDonald, 2011)
Results reveal that thermal conditions in the experiments have a significant impact on the azoxystrobin tolerance of the P. infestans populations (Table 1, Figure 2)
Summary
Continuing evolutionary processes in pathogens can quickly reduce the efficacy of all classes of pesticides after they are commercially adopted for a certain period of time, thereby presenting a great threat to plant disease management in both agricultural and natural ecosystems. Temperature is among the most important environmental factors that can have a critical influence on all aspects of biological (Clarke, 2003; Knies et al, 2006), ecological (Chen et al, 2017; Loehle et al, 2016), and biochemical processes of species (Park et al, 2011; Yu et al, 2019) It can affect the development and evolution of pesticide resistance directly by (i) altering chemical properties of pesticide compounds (Schade et al, 2014), (ii) changing the mutation rate and expression of target genes as well as the interaction of the target genes with other genes (Cuco et al, 2018), or (iii) or modifying the enzymatic activities, metabolic rates, and physiological conditions of cells (Mariette et al, 2016; Sharma et al, 2011). The specific objectives of the study are to: (i) understand the variation and spatial distribution of azoxystrobin tolerance in P. infestans; (ii) determine the main evolutionary mechanism responsible for the variation and distribution of azoxystrobin tolerance in P. infestans; (iii) evaluate the contribution of temperature on the evolution of azoxystrobin resistance in P. infestans; and (iv) infer the impact of global warming on the sustainable management of plant disease in agricultural and natural ecosystems
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