Profiling the Evolutionary Adaptation of the Zymoseptoria tritici to Control Measures and Changing Temperatures

Wheat is the most important food crop worldwide.

Septoria blotch caused by Zymoseptoria tritici is a major disease of wheat, causing up to 30% yield loss in Sweden and the world.

Due to continuous and rapid evolution of the pathogen, control strategies such as fungicide application and resistance deployment can be systematically compromised, particularly under climate changes. To mitigate this problem there is an urgent need for increased knowledge of pathogen evolution.

Here, we will use population genomics and transcriptomics approach to understand patterns and drivers of pathogen adaptation to crop resistance and temperature.

We will achieve these by comparative analyses of genomic characters, pathogenicity and fungicide resistance among field populations of the pathogen from different resistant cultivars and temperature regions.

We will then integrate the evolutionary knowledge into mathematical model to project future Septoria epidemics and optimize it mitigation.

Considering the novel and timely approach to the complex problem of sustainable disease management, we expect our unprecedented insights into evolutionary links among crop immunity, thermal adaptation, fungicide resistance and aggressiveness, which is important to formulate an ecologically and economically friendly way of managing wheat septora disease in eras of ongoing climatic changes.