Is there evidence for post-epidemic attenuation in the Dutch elm disease pathogen Ophiostoma novo-ulmi?

The first pandemic of Dutch elm disease (DED) in Europe and North America caused by the introduced Ophiostoma ulmi began in the early 1900s but declined unexpectedly in Europe from the 1930s onwards after killing 30-40% of the elms. Later a second pandemic caused by the much more aggressive Ophiostoma novo-ulmi spread across the same areas and by 1990 most of Britain's c. 30 million mature elms had died. During the second pandemic, O. novo-ulmi acquired debilitating viruses and changed from being largely clonal to highly heterogeneous through horizontal transfer of novel, sometimes deleterious, genes from O. ulmi. In the post-epidemic period a new disease dynamic has emerged, with millions of small recruitment elms repeatedly attacked by sequential cycles of disease. This study investigated the possibility of pathogenic attenuation in O. novo-ulmi as the epidemic has progressed. Isolates collected from the three original outbreak areas in Britain in 1982-3 (early post-epidemic period) and 2011 (advanced post-epidemic) were compared for two fitness components: pathogenic aggressiveness and in vitro growth rate. Mean aggressiveness of the 2011 isolates to clonal English elm (Ulmus procera) proved not to differ significantly from that of the 1982 isolates, either overall or within each outbreak area. Similarly, the mean growth rates of the 1982 and 2011 samples showed no differences. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the future of the current DED pandemic in Europe, the decline of the first pandemic, and the difficulty of drawing parallels between different tree-pathogen systems.