Primed to fail: primed acclimation to water stress can lead to greater disease severity and reduced yields in <i>Sclerotium rolfsii</i> -inoculated cultivated peanut ( <i>Arachis hypogaea</i> L.)

We documented the absence of a beneficial cross-priming result as we did not see reduced southern blight progression among plants exposed to the PWS. Crucially, we observed a three-way interaction between cultivar, PWS, and SWS in inoculated plants, whereby the treatment combinations "Georgia-06G→P-50FC→S-0FC" and "Florun331→P-50FC→S-100FC" had substantially greater disease severity than their P-100FC counterparts. Serendipitously, we observed reduced secondary transmission of southern blight in P-50FC treated plants. Overall, our results caution that drought acclimation may not only fail to deliver crop production benefits but could even have an adverse influence on peanut yields and disease severity.