The Evolution of Fungicide Resistance Resulting from Combinations of Foliar-Acting Systemic Seed Treatments and Foliar-Applied Fungicides: A Modeling Analysis

For the treatment of foliar diseases of cereals, fungicides may be applied as foliar sprays or systemic seed treatments which are translocated to leaves. Little research has been done to assess the resistance risks associated with foliar-acting systemic seed treatments when used alone or in combination with foliar sprays, even though both types of treatment may share the same mode of action. It is therefore unknown to what extent adding a systemic seed treatment to a foliar spray programme poses an additional resistance risk and whether in the presence of a seed treatment additional resistance management strategies (such as limiting the total number of treatments) are necessary to limit the evolution of fungicide-resistance. A mathematical model was developed to simulate an epidemic and the resistance evolution of Zymoseptoria tritici on winter wheat, which was used to compare different combinations of seed and foliar treatments by calculating the fungicide effective life, i.e. the number of years before effective disease control is lost to resistance. A range of parameterizations for the seed treatment fungicide and different fungicide uptake models were compared. Despite the different parameterizations, the model consistently predicted the same trends in that i) similar levels of efficacy delivered either by a foliar-acting seed treatment, or a foliar application, resulted in broadly similar resistance selection, ii) adding a foliar-acting seed treatment to a foliar spray programme increased resistance selection and usually decreased effective life, and iii) splitting a given total dose—by adding a seed treatment to foliar treatments, but decreasing dose per treatment—gave effective lives that were the same as, or shorter than those given by the spray programme alone. For our chosen plant-pathogen-fungicide system, the model results suggest that to effectively manage selection for fungicide-resistance, foliar acting systemic seed treatments should be included as one of the maximum number of permitted fungicide applications.