Achieving sustainable plant disease management through evolutionary principles

• Plant disease control involves an ongoing battle between pathogens and management.
• Targeting inoculum production and survival reduces disease and pathogen evolution.
• Gene-based control is eroded by evolution for infectivity/aggressiveness in pathogens.
• Short-term disease control often does not consider longer-term evolutionary outcomes.
• Durable disease control requires multidisciplinary research led by evolutionary biologists.

Plants and their pathogens are engaged in continuous evolutionary battles and sustainable disease management requires novel systems to create environments conducive for short-term and long-term disease control. In this opinion article, we argue that knowledge of the fundamental factors that drive host–pathogen coevolution in wild systems can provide new insights into disease development in agriculture. Such evolutionary principles can be used to guide the formulation of sustainable disease management strategies which can minimize disease epidemics while simultaneously reducing pressure on pathogens to evolve increased infectivity and aggressiveness. To ensure agricultural sustainability, disease management programs that reflect the dynamism of pathogen population structure are essential and evolutionary biologists should play an increasing role in their design.