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Abstract:
Plants and their pathogens are locked in a perpetual coevolutionary battle for survival. We present a transcontinental investigation of coevolution in the Hyaloperonospora arabidopsidis – Arabidopsis thaliana pathosystem. We generate whole genome sequences of over 400 host- pathogen pairs from natural infections collected throughout both the native eurasian range and the human-commensal colonisation of North America, as well as new near-complete long-read genome assemblies with evidence-based annotation. We investigate the demographic history of both host and pathogen, examine coevolution both generally and of individual gene pairs, and describe variation in the genetic networks of interacting host and pathogen genes. Our results show that the negative-frequency dependent selection on both the pathogen and host genomes leads to the presence of balanced polymorphisms in the wild pathosystem, in contrast to the directional selection generally experienced by pathogens of crop pathosystems.
