A species-specific tale of quantitative disease resistance (QDR) in tomato

Due to the molecular complexity and inefficacy of the gene-for-gene immune response, it is a considerable challenge to engineer disease-resistant crops against necrotrophic pathogens (Mengiste and Liao, 2025).Quantitative disease resistance (QDR) is an alternative to the "all or nothing" gene-for-gene model in plants, in which QDR confers plants partial resistance to a broad spectrum of pathogens.Therefore, enhancing QDR in crop plants is critical to provide resistance against necrotrophic pathogens.Delplace et al. (2025; highlighted by Ng [2025]) explored QDR diversity among Arabidopsis accessions, identifying core QDR genes involved in response to infection by the necrotrophic fungus Sclerotinia sclerotiorum. Recent work byIn their new work, Severin Einspanier and colleagues (Einspanier et al. 2025) inspected the transcriptome of five tomato species to characterize the evolution of QDR-regulation in response to S.