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Poster

Session: Session 2 Presenting Authors at Posters (Evens)

P-412 - Genetic insights into the growth-defense trade-off in lettuce

Thursday, July 17, 2025
13:30 - 15:15  
Location: Confex Hall 3
Plant Regulation of biotic and abiotic stress – trade-offs
When plant defenses are activated, growth is often inhibited. This growth-defense trade-off is poorly understood, as only a few molecular components have been identified to date, predominantly in non-crop species. Here, we have leveraged advances in high-throughput automated digital phenotyping and pangenomics to gain genetic insights into the growth-defense trade-off in cultivated lettuce. For this, we transiently exposed a diverse set of 180 lettuce genotypes to two defense-eliciting, and thus growth-inhibiting, treatments – MeJA and BTH (a functional analog of SA) – while monitoring these plants day and night with four top-view imaging systems, capturing RGB, chlorophyll fluorescence, thermal, and hyperspectral images. Time-resolved phenomics-based GWAS for thousands of traits resulted in the identification of both known and novel growth, photosynthesis, and trade-off QTLs. Candidate genes within these QTLs will provide a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the growth-defense trade-off, which in turn can facilitate the development of crops that are both high-yielding and disease-resistant.