Oral Paper

         Mycology & Phycology

Phylogenomic investigation of Botrytis metabolic diversification

Presenting Author
Jordan Dowell
Description
Metabolic responses to dynamic conditions drive intraspecific variation and shape species’ interactions. Among metabolic responses, the use and allocation of energetic resources are critical to host-pathogen interactions. Among plant fungal pathogens, small effector proteins and metabolites are associated with variation in host-specificity. However, efficiently leveraging a host as an energy resource is critical to pathogen fitness. Here we leverage the genus Botrytis as a model to investigate the relationship between host-generalism and metabolic variation using combinations of phylogenomic and genome-scale metabolic modeling approaches. We assessed 20 species of Botrytis, identifying over >5000 single-copy orthologs to produce a maximum likelihood phylogeny with over 99% bootstrap support of all nodes. We reconstructed genome-scale models of metabolism for each species and assessed variation in metabolic flux in silico. The evolution of host-specificity was correlated with the simulated growth rate. Among species, we corroborate evidence of horizontal gene transfer of effector genes. However, we find no evidence of horizontal gene transfer of primary metabolic enzymes. Our results indicate the potential decoupling of host-energetic use from genes associated with combating host-immune responses in the evolution of host-specificity in Botrytis.