Yield penalties of disease resistance in crops

Recently, there have been rapid developments in understanding the costs of disease and pest resistance in model plants and their ecological relevance in wild plants. In crop plants, however, much (although not all) of our current understanding of costs of resistance must be inferred from research on model species. To determine the true costs of resistance in crops and the likely benefit of resistance genes in new cultivars, however, other aspects of the plant's phenotype must be studied alongside resistance.