S01 - Session O4 - Keynote: Breeding strategies to counter plant pandemics

Authors: Richard Michelmore *

Plant pandemics caused by a variety of viral, bacterial, fungal, and oomycete pathogens are a chronic threat to the food supply worldwide. Disease control relies on combinations of prophylactic and therapeutic interventions along with the use of resistant genotypes. This imposes strong selection pressures on pathogen populations to overcome these control measures and diseases often exhibit an unstable equilibrium that results in a boom-and-bust cycle. The goal of many resistance gene deployment and chemical control programs is to shift the equilibrium in favor of minimal disease. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to understand the extant and potential pathogen variation as well as the repertoire of resistance genes accessible in the host and available chemicals. This requires global monitoring of the pathogen and understanding of the pangenomes of crop species. Neither of these objectives are trivial undertakings. However, contemporary technologies, some of which have been developed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, provide new opportunities to reduce the threat of plant pandemics. Conversely, high throughput technologies that have been developed for genotyping breeding populations are applicable for inexpensive, community-scale monitoring of SARS-CoV-2.