Many necrotrophic plant pathogens utilize host-selective toxins or necrotrophic effectors during the infection process. We hypothesized that the chlorotic yellow halos frequently observed around necrotic lesions caused by the wheat pathogen Zymoseptoria tritici could result from the activity of necrotrophic effectors interacting with the products of toxin sensitivity genes. As an initial step toward testing this hypothesis, we developed an automated image analysis (AIA) workflow that could quantify the degree of yellow halo formation occurring in wheat leaves naturally infected by a highly diverse pathogen population under field conditions. This AIA based on statistical learning was applied to more than 10,000 naturally infected leaves collected from 335 wheat cultivars grown in a replicated field experiment. We estimated a high heritability (h2 = 0.71) for the degree of yellow halo formation, suggesting that this quantitative trait has a significant genetic component. Using genome-wide association mapping, we identified six chromosome segments significantly associated with the yellow halo phenotype. Most of these segments contained candidate genes associated with targets of necrotrophic effectors in other necrotrophic pathogens. Our findings conform with the hypothesis that toxin sensitivity genes could account for a significant fraction of the observed variation in quantitative resistance to Septoria tritici blotch. [Formula: see text] Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY 4.0 International license.
Keywords: automated image analysis; host-selective toxin; machine learning; phenomics.