Leaf Endophytes of Act as Pathogens of Neighboring Plant Species.

The conventional definition of endophytes is that they do not cause disease, whereas pathogens do. Complicating this convention, however, is the poorly explored phenomenon that some microbes are endophytes in some plants but pathogens in others. Black cottonwood or poplar () and wheat () are common wild and crop plants, respectively, in the Pacific Northwest USA. The former anchors wild, riparian communities, whereas the latter is an introduced domesticate of commercial importance in the region. We isolated a well-known pathogen of wheat causing both blight and rot - from the leaf of a black cottonwood tree in western Washington. The pathogenicity of this cottonwood isolate and of a wheat isolate of were compared by inoculating both cottonwood and wheat in a greenhouse experiment. We found that both the cottonwood and wheat isolates of significantly reduced the growth of wheat, whereas they had no impact on cottonwood growth. Our results demonstrate that the cottonwood isolate of is endophytic in one plant species but pathogenic in another. Using sequence-based methods, we found an additional 56 taxa in the foliar microbiome of cottonwood that matched the sequences of pathogens of other plants of the region. These sequence-based findings suggest, though they do not prove, that may host many additional pathogens of other plants.