Letter to the editor regarding Delplace et al. 2025

Dear Editor, We read with interest a recent study published in your journal entitled “Neutral transcriptome rewiring promotes quantitative disease resistance (QDR) evolvability at the species level” (Delplace et al. 2025). In this experiment, lesion growth rates and host transcriptional responses caused by Sclerotinia sclerotiorum were measured 24 hours post infection (hpi) on 23 diverse Arabidopsis thaliana accessions. Two goals of this study were to characterize the global gene expression patterns that underlie QDR and to assess their evolvability. This work is innovative for incorporating intraspecific genetic variation and for tackling these interesting but challenging questions. We would however like to inject a note of caution as we feel that this study is illustrative of a concerning trend in which large datasets and powerful analyses may be somewhat over-interpreted. Our main concerns are (1) the inappropriate conflation of defense response with disease resistance, (2) the implied extrapolation from a highly specific plant-pathogen interaction to general plant disease resistance, and (3) the over-interpretation of this dataset to draw unsupported conclusions on how QDR evolves.