Data from: The polygenic strategies of host-specific and general virulence of Botrytis cinerea across diverse eudicot hosts

Diverse qualitative and quantitative genetic architectures can
successfully enable fungal virulence and host range. To model the
quantitative genetic architecture of a generalist pathogen with an
extensive host range, we conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS)
of the lesion area of Botrytis cinerea across eight hosts. This revealed
that it was possible to partition the virulence, as defined by the lesion
area, into common and host-specific components across all hosts from
host-specific virulence. All traits showed that a large proportion of the
Botrytis genome likely contributes to fungal lesion development on leaves
with small effect sizes. The candidate genes are evenly spread across the
core chromosomes with no indication of bipartite genomic architecture. The
GWAS-identified polymorphisms and genes show that B. cinerea relies on
genetic variants across hundreds of genes for growing on diverse hosts,
with most genes influencing relatively few hosts. When pathogen genes were
associated with multiple hosts, they were associated with unrelated rather
than related host species. Comparative genomics further suggested that the
GWAS-identified genes are largely syntenic with other specialist Botrytis
species and not unique to B. cinerea. Overall, as shown in A. thaliana, B.
cinerea’s generalist behavior is derived from the sum of the genome-wide
genetic variation acting within gene networks that differentially
coordinate the interaction with diverse hosts.