Genomic surveillance uncovers a pandemic clonal lineage of the wheat blast fungus.

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.

Genomic rearrangements generate hypervariable mini-chromosomes in host-specific isolates of the blast fungus.

Supernumerary mini-chromosomes-a unique type of genomic structural variation-have been implicated in the emergence of virulence traits in plant pathogenic fungi. However, the mechanisms that facilitate the emergence and maintenance of mini-chromosomes across fungi remain poorly understood. In the blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae (Syn. Pyricularia oryzae), mini-chromosomes have been first described in the early 1990s but, until very recently, have been overlooked in genomic studies. Here we investigated structural variation in four isolates of the blast fungus M. oryzae from different grass hosts and analyzed the sequences of mini-chromosomes in the rice, foxtail millet and goosegrass isolates. The mini-chromosomes of these isolates turned out to be highly diverse with distinct sequence composition. They are enriched in repetitive elements and have lower gene density than core-chromosomes. We identified several virulence-related genes in the mini-chromosome of the rice isolate, including the virulence-related polyketide synthase Ace1 and two variants of the effector gene AVR-Pik. Macrosynteny analyses around these loci revealed structural rearrangements, including inter-chromosomal translocations between core- and mini-chromosomes. Our findings provide evidence that mini-chromosomes emerge from structural rearrangements and segmental duplication of core-chromosomes and might contribute to adaptive evolution of the blast fungus.

Differential loss of effector genes in three recently expanded pandemic clonal lineages of the rice blast fungus.

BACKGROUND: Understanding the mechanisms and timescales of plant pathogen outbreaks requires a detailed genome-scale analysis of their population history. The fungus Magnaporthe (Syn. Pyricularia) oryzae-the causal agent of blast disease of cereals- is among the most destructive plant pathogens to world agriculture and a major threat to the production of rice, wheat, and other cereals. Although M. oryzae is a multihost pathogen that infects more than 50 species of cereals and grasses, all rice-infecting isolates belong to a single genetically defined lineage. Here, we combined the two largest genomic datasets to reconstruct the genetic history of the rice-infecting lineage of M. oryzae based on 131 isolates from 21 countries. RESULTS: The global population of the rice blast fungus consists mainly of three well-defined genetic groups and a diverse set of individuals. Multiple population genetic tests revealed that the rice-infecting lineage of the blast fungus probably originated from a recombining diverse group in Southeast Asia followed by three independent clonal expansions that took place over the last ~ 200 years. Patterns of allele sharing identified a subpopulation from the recombining diverse group that introgressed with one of the clonal lineages before its global expansion. Remarkably, the four genetic lineages of the rice blast fungus vary in the number and patterns of presence and absence of candidate effector genes. These genes encode secreted proteins that modulate plant defense and allow pathogen colonization. In particular, clonal lineages carry a reduced repertoire of effector genes compared with the diverse group, and specific combinations of presence and absence of effector genes define each of the pandemic clonal lineages. CONCLUSIONS: Our analyses reconstruct the genetic history of the rice-infecting lineage of M. oryzae revealing three clonal lineages associated with rice blast pandemics. Each of these lineages displays a specific pattern of presence and absence of effector genes that may have shaped their adaptation to the rice host and their evolutionary history.