From herbarium to life: Implications of reviving historical fungi for modern plant pathology and agriculture

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.