The clonal dynamic in wild and agricultural plant–pathogen populations

Abstract

The stability or change in clone frequencies during the disease cycle and from year to year is what I term the clonal dynamic. Among pathogenic fungi, the prevalence of efficient asexual reproduction affords the opportunity for invasive, epidemic, clonal colonization and spread. Clonality is probably most extreme in monoculture, although it could be expected to be important in wild plants and in transfers of adaptive pathogenic genotypes between wild and cultivated plants. The clonal dynamic was studied in Sclerotinia sclerotiorum in two experiments, one on four Canadian field populations of cultivated canola and the other on two Norwegian populations of a wild perennial plant, Ranunculus ficaria. Additional samples were made from canola and other crops in Canada and Norway. Four major differences between the agricultural and wild populations were observed. First, in agricultural populations, DNA fingerprint (multilocus haplotype) and mycelial compatibility group were coupled; all individual members of a clone shared a unique fingerprint and all were mycelially compatible. In wild populations, DNA fingerprint and mycelial compatibility group were decoupled. Second, in agricultural populations fingerprint diversity was high, with 594 genotypes recovered from 2747 isolates, but frequently sampled clones were recovered from a wide geographical area repeatedly over a 3-year period; in wild populations fingerprint diversity was low, with 7 genotypes from 300 isolates, and highly localized. Third, in agricultural populations, no evidence of outcrossing and segregation was observed; in the wild populations, some sibling ascospores showed different mycelial compatibility reactions, indicating that crossing had occurred. Last, in agricultural populations, clones were randomly dispersed spatially, probably the result of immigration and mixing of inoculum in air; in the apparently isolated wild populations, strong spatial substructuring was indicated by the distribution of fingerprints, apparently the result of highly localized inbreeding. Clonality was therefore clearly detected in the cultivated plant populations but was difficult to distinguish from inbreeding in the wild populations. Key words: multilocus haplotype, clonality, asexual reproduction, population genetics.