Multi-site fungicides suppress banana Panama disease, caused by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense Tropical Race 4
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Global banana production is currently challenged by Panama disease, caused by Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense Tropical Race 4 (FocTR4). There are no effective fungicide-based strategies to control this soil-borne pathogen. This could be due to insensitivity of the pathogen to fungicides and/or soil application per se. Here, we test the effect of 12 single-site and 9 multi-site fungicides against FocTR4 and Foc Race1 (FocR1) in quantitative colony growth, and cell survival assays in purified FocTR4 macroconidia, microconidia and chlamydospores. We demonstrate that these FocTR4 morphotypes all cause Panama disease in bananas. These experiments reveal innate resistance of FocTR4 to all single-site fungicides, with neither azoles, nor succinate dehydrogenase inhibitors (SDHIs), strobilurins or benzimidazoles killing these spore forms. We show in fungicide-treated hyphae that this innate resistance occurs in a subpopulation of "persister" cells and is not genetically inherited. FocTR4 persisters respond to 3 μg ml-1 azoles or 1000 μg ml-1 strobilurins or SDHIs by strong up-regulation of genes encoding target enzymes (up to 660-fold), genes for putative efflux pumps and transporters (up to 230-fold) and xenobiotic detoxification enzymes (up to 200-fold). Comparison of gene expression in FocTR4 and Zymoseptoria tritici, grown under identical conditions, reveals that this response is only observed in FocTR4. In contrast, FocTR4 shows little innate resistance to most multi-site fungicides. However, quantitative virulence assays, in soil-grown bananas, reveals that only captan (20 μg ml-1) and all lipophilic cations (200 μg ml-1) suppress Panama disease effectively. These fungicides could help protect bananas from future yield losses by FocTR4.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".