*2.1. Symptoms of Infected Tea Plants*

We inspected the typical anthracnose symptoms in *Colletotrichum* susceptible tea cultivars "Longjing-43" (LJ43) and "Zhenong-139" (ZN139). The infected leaves were observed to be gray sunken or shrunk necrotic lesions (Figure 1a). In the late stage, the pathogens made the leaves partially withered, fragile, or easily broken, compared to the healthy leaf (Figure 1a left). The infected leaves of both cultivars "LJ43" and "ZN139" showed the same symptoms and the major pathogen isolated from the infected leaves was *Colletotrichum gloeosporioides*. A detailed view of anthracnose-infected tea plant occurrence in tea fields as well as sample preparation and experiment scheme are shown in Figure 1.

**Figure 1.** Sample preparation and experiment scheme. (**a**) Anthracnose of tea plant occurrence in tea field. Yellow arrow represents healthy leaf (left) and partially enlarged drawing of anthracnose infected leaf (right). (**b**) A schematic diagram of a healthy leaf (left) and an infected leaf (right). The leaf slices were cut for RNA isolation as described in red boxes. Pairwise comparisons for LJ43 and ZN139 were conducted by arrows. Horizontal arrows mean comparisons between healthy leaves (LJ43\_H and ZN139\_H) and anthracnose disease infected leaves (LJ43\_D & ZN139\_D) within cultivar, and the vertical arrow indicates comparisons between cultivars.
