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From Herbarium to life: Implications of Reviving Historical Fungi for Modern Plant Pathology and Agriculture.

ABSTRACT: The Green Revolution (GR) profoundly altered plant–microorganism interactions through widespread agrochemical use and crop breeding. Phytopathogenic fungi present major challenges to agriculture by reducing yield and quality, increasing production costs, and impacting food security and environmental sustainability. Historical biological collections preserving pre-GR diversity are key to understanding how modern intensive agriculture has shaped these interactions. In this study, we revived two Botrytis cinerea strains from the early 1940s and performed phenotypic, genomic, transcriptomic, and metabolomic analyses. Comparisons with modern strains revealed significant differences, including adaptations likely driven by fungicide use and environmental pressures such as host-specific pathogenicity and pH tolerance. Our findings highlight the value of natural history collections and demonstrate how archived pathogens can be revisited with advanced omic technologies to reveal long-term ecological and evolutionary changes. These insights are crucial for plant disease management, outbreak prediction, biodiversity conservation, and advancing sustainable agriculture practices.

INSTRUMENT(S): Liquid Chromatography MS - negative - reverse phase, Liquid Chromatography MS - positive - reverse phase

PROVIDER: MTBLS12551 | MetaboLights | 2025-06-10

REPOSITORIES: MetaboLights

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Project description:<p>The living and dried specimens in botanical collections play an important role in society for scientific and recreational purposes, offering the opportunity to obtain both macroscopic and molecular information for individual plants, ecosystems, and environmental studies. Untargeted metabolomics is an analytical approach that permits the simultaneous study of multiple small molecules present in an organism, which allows us to statistically compare different conditions of interest. Metabolomic approaches have been used on living specimens in botanical collections, but, until now, not on historical dried material. Using the Nicotiana genus herbaceous plant (tobacco) as a case study, we propose an untargeted metabolomic study to evaluate the potential of dried historical specimens as a source of metabolomic information on the past. The metabolomic profile from polar and less-polar/apolar aqueous extracts of four modern handmade tobacco cigars (split into wrapper, binder, and filler leaves), and a set of eight late-19th to early-20th century tobacco specimens (seven tobacco leaves and one snuff powder) from the collection of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew (London, UK) were analysed by liquid chromatography coupled to high resolution mass spectrometry. Results showed a wide range of polar and less-polar/apolar molecules which are preserved in dried botanical material, providing information optimal for metabolomic studies. The metabolomic profiles of historical dried samples were distinct enough to classify as Nicotiana tabacum or Nicotiana rustica, and showed differences based on geographic provenance or product transformation/processing. Statistical models based on the molecular data from the historical material permitted us to validate the labelling of the historical collection, which identified one possible mislabelled specimen and offered some clues as to the species of one unknown Nicotiana sample. Finally, metabolomic differences in profiles between Nicotiana tabacum and modern cigars showed that both share a large proportion of their metabolomic profile, where molecular differences could be possibly associated with both location of growth and anthropogenic transformation suffered by the plant in the last two centuries. This study demonstrates that dry botanical collections are a feasible source of information, and, if applied to a large set of individuals, conclusions may be drawn about the possible evolution and anthropogenic modification over time in plant material. The results are significant for disciplines interested in the history of plants, such as botany, history and archaeology.</p>

			Action	DRS
	F-12-23-D_neg.raw	Raw
	F-12-23-D_pos.raw	Raw
	F-12-23-E_neg.raw	Raw
	F-12-23-E_pos.raw	Raw
	F-12-23-F_neg.raw	Raw

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From Herbarium to life: Implications of Reviving Historical Fungi for Modern Plant Pathology and Agriculture.

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