Durable resistance or efficient disease control? Adult Plant Resistance (APR) at the heart of the dilemma

Adult plant resistance (APR) is an incomplete and delayed protection of plants against pathogens. At first glance, such resistance should be less efficient than classical major-effect resistance genes, which confer complete resistance from seedling stage, to reduce epidemics. However, by allowing some ‘leaky’ levels of disease, APR genes are predicted to be more durable than major genes because they exert a weaker selection pressure on pathogens towards adaptation to resistance. However, the impact of partial efficiency and delayed mode of action of APR on the evolutionary and epidemiological outcomes of resistance deployment has never been tested.

Using the demogenetic, spatially explicit, temporal, stochastic modellandsepi, this study is a first attempt to investigate how resistance efficiency, age at the time of resistance activation and target pathogenicity trait jointly impact resistance durability and disease control at the landscape scale. Our numerical experiments explore the deployment of APR in a simulated agricultural landscape, alone or together with a major resistance gene. As a case study, the mathematical model has been parameterised for rust fungi (genusPuccinia) of cereal crops, for which extensive data are available.

Our simulations confirm that weak efficiency and delayed activation of APR genes reduce the selection pressure applied on pathogens and their propensity to overcome resistance, but do not confer effective protection. On the other hand, stronger APR genes (which increase selection pressure on the pathogen) may be quickly overcome but have the potential to provide some disease protection in the short-term. This is attributed to strong competition between different pathogen genotypes and the presence of fitness costs of adaptation, especially when APR genes are deployed together with a major resistance gene via crop mixtures or rotations.