The term vertical resistance, used commonly in the context of plant selection, was first used in 1963 by

James Edward Van der Plank James may refer to: People * James (given name) * James (surname) * James (musician), aka Faruq Mahfuz Anam James, (born 1964), Bollywood musician * James, brother of Jesus * King James (disambiguation), various kings named James * Prince James ...

to describe single-gene resistance. This contrasted with the term horizontal resistance which was used to describe many-gene resistance. In 1976,

Raoul A. Robinson Raoul A. Robinson (September 25, 1928 in Saint Helier, Jersey - 25 July 2014) was a Canadian/British plant scientist with more than forty years of wide-ranging global experience in crop improvement for both commercial and subsistence agriculture. ...

adapted the original definition of vertical resistance and argued that in vertical resistance there were individual genes for resistance in the host plant and also individual genes for parasitic ability in the parasite. This phenomenon is known as the

gene-for-gene relationship The gene-for-gene relationship is a concept in plant pathology that plants and their diseases each have single genes that interact with each other during an infection. It was proposed by Harold Henry Flor who was working with rust (''Melampsora l ...

, and it was the defining character of vertical resistance.

References

Phytopathology Molecular biology {{genetics-stub