From triangle to pyramid: Understanding host-microbiome-pathogen-environment interplay for enviromics-empowered sustainable plant disease management

Understanding plant disease development requires moving beyond the classical disease triangle, which considers host, pathogen, and environment. Recent advances in multiomics highlight the importance of disease pyramid that integrates host, pathogen, microbiome, and environment (HPME) to capture the complex interactions among these core biological/ecological components. This pyramid network emphasizes how host genetic architecture, pathogen traits, microbiome dynamics, and environmental conditions collectively and interactively shape disease outcomes, plant phenotypes, and adaptive potential. The conceptual expansion from the disease triangle into pyramid network reflects this shift, providing a more holistic and dynamic view of plant disease ecology. Environments regulate host susceptibility, and restructures both pathogen and non-pathogen microbial communities, thereby influencing infection severity and disease progression. Multi-omics approaches (hostomics, pathomics, microbiomics, and enviromics) hold promise for dissecting these interactions and enabling predictive disease modeling and sustainable management strategies. Moreover, integrating enviromic data into resistance breeding enables the identification of environmental factors and their interaction with host genotype and pathogen and non-pathogen microbes, and supports the deployment of durable resistance across diverse agroecosystems. Together, these perspectives advance a systems-level understanding of plant health and open new avenues for disease management through omics-driven breeding, microbiome-informed strategies, and environment-responsive interventions.