Centre for Life's Origins and Evolution, Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
The Sainsbury Laboratory, University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, United Kingdom.
PLoS Biol. 2023 Apr 11;21(4):e3002052. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002052. eCollection 2023 Apr.
Wheat, one of the most important food crops, is threatened by a blast disease pandemic. Here, we show that a clonal lineage of the wheat blast fungus recently spread to Asia and Africa following two independent introductions from South America. Through a combination of genome analyses and laboratory experiments, we show that the decade-old blast pandemic lineage can be controlled by the Rmg8 disease resistance gene and is sensitive to strobilurin fungicides. However, we also highlight the potential of the pandemic clone to evolve fungicide-insensitive variants and sexually recombine with African lineages. This underscores the urgent need for genomic surveillance to track and mitigate the spread of wheat blast outside of South America and to guide preemptive wheat breeding for blast resistance.
小麦是最重要的粮食作物之一，正受到一种毁灭性疾病的威胁。在这里，我们表明，一种小麦赤霉病菌的克隆谱系最近通过南美两次独立传入而传播到亚洲和非洲。通过基因组分析和实验室实验的结合，我们表明，这种存在了十年的毁灭性疾病流行谱系可以被 Rmg8 抗病基因控制，并且对 strobilurin 类杀菌剂敏感。然而，我们也强调了该流行克隆体产生对杀菌剂不敏感的变异体和与非洲谱系发生有性重组的潜力。这突显了进行基因组监测以追踪和减轻小麦赤霉病在南美以外地区的传播并指导针对赤霉病的小麦抗性的预防性选育的迫切需要。
