Plant Pathogens and Fungal Diseases

Fungi that colonize plants span a spectrum from harmful pathogens to symptomless endophytes living quietly within healthy tissue, and understanding where a given species falls on that spectrum requires tracing its evolutionary history, decoding its genome, and mapping which hosts it can infect. Researchers use molecular tools — DNA barcoding, phylogenetic reconstruction, and comparative genomics — to distinguish species that look alike under a microscope yet differ sharply in their capacity to cause disease, a distinction that matters for agriculture, forestry, and biosecurity. One persistent challenge is that host specificity is often poorly understood: the same fungal lineage may devastate one plant species while coexisting peacefully with a close relative, and the molecular mechanisms driving that selectivity remain largely unresolved. Ongoing work is increasingly focused on how endophytic fungi transition to pathogenic states and on building robust taxonomic frameworks that can keep pace with the flood of genomic data revealing cryptic diversity within familiar species complexes.

Works

254,543

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2,304,777

Keywords

Fungal PathogensEndophytic FungiPhylogenetic AnalysisGenomic CharacterizationPlant PathogenesisSpecies Recognition