View article

Plants can defend themselves against a wide array of enemies, from microbes to large animals, yet there is great variability in the effectiveness of such defences, both within and between species. Some of this variation can be explained by conflicting pressures from pathogens with different modes of attack. A second explanation comes from an evolutionary ‘tug of war’, in which pathogens adapt to evade detection, until the plant has evolved new recognition capabilities for pathogen invasion^,,,. If selection is, however, sufficiently strong, susceptible hosts should remain rare. That this is not the case is best explained by costs incurred from constitutive defences in a pest-free environment^,,,,,. Using a combination of forward genetics and genome-wide association analyses, we demonstrate that allelic diversity at a single locus, ACCELERATED CELL DEATH 6 (ACD6)^,, underpins marked pleiotropic differences in both …