Molecular epidemiology of Cercospora leaf spot on resistant and susceptible sugar beet hybrids

Cercospora leaf spot (CLS), caused by Cercospora beticola, is a major foliar disease impacting sugar beet production worldwide. The development of new resistant sugar beet hybrids is a powerful tool to better manage the disease, but it is unclear how these hybrids affect CLS epidemiology. We used a molecular epidemiology approach to study natural epidemics of CLS affecting two susceptible and two resistant sugar beet hybrids at two field sites. Infected plants were geotagged on a weekly basis. Isolations of C. beticola were made from infected leaves and genotyped using six simple‐sequence repeat loci to identify clones. We determined that CLS epidemics had a later onset in plots planted to resistant hybrids, but once the pathogen established an infection, there was little difference between resistant and susceptible hybrids in the probability of localized spread and dispersal. We found that different clones often infected the same leaf and that clusters of infected plants were often colonized by a mixture of clones. There was little overall difference in genetic diversity of C. beticola collected on resistant and susceptible hybrids; however, genotypic diversity was lower on the resistant hybrid at one site, suggestive of a selection bottleneck. At the end of the epidemic infections were not randomly distributed across the fields and we found that a single clone could spread over a distance of 100 m during a growing season.