Oral Presentation Australasian Plant Pathology Society Conference 2025

Multi-omic analysis of Net Blotch disease in barley: insights into pathogen genome expansion and discovery of barley genes using an improved annotation pipeline (118572)

Yutathkarn D Coles 1 , Jade Davis 1 , Sabrina Cuellar 1 , Ciara Gifford 1 , Kristina Gagalova 1 , Lilian Sanglard 1 , Robabeh Hosseini 1 , Ayalsew Zerihun 1 , Mark R Gibberd 1 , Fatima Naim 1
  1. Centre for Crop and Disease Management, Curtin University, Bentley, WA, Australia

Net Blotch is a damaging barley disease caused by the necrotrophic fungal pathogen Pyrenophora teres. It occurs in two phenotypically distinct forms: Net Form Net Blotch caused by Pyrenophora teres f. teres (Ptt) and Spot Form Net Blotch caused by Pyrenophora teres f. maculata (Ptm). The recent emergence of fungicide-resistant, increasingly virulent pathotypes and the lack of resistant barley germplasm seriously threaten our barley production. To understand the mechanisms of pathogenicity and differences in virulence, we used various WA-collected Ptt isolates that generate a range of disease phenotypes in commercial barley cultivars. We applied a combination of leaf imaging, confocal microscopy, long-read genome assemblies of the pathogen, and gene expression profiling from targeted tissue sampling of infected leaves. We found that the genomes of the virulent pathotypes of Ptt contained a higher percentage of repeat elements and copy number variation. We also discovered novel barley genes using a new in-house pipeline incorporating direct-RNA reads to improve gene annotations. I will present our recent findings on host-driven adaptation of the pathogen.