Rust fungal pathogens of wheat (Triticum spp.) affect crop yields worldwide. The molecular mechanisms underlying the virulence of these pathogens remain elusive, due to the limited availability of suitable molecular genetic research tools. Notably, the inability to perform high-throughput analyses of candidate virulence proteins (also known as effectors) impairs progress. We previously establis...

Equol, a metabolite of soybean isoflavone daidzein, has been proven to have various bioactivities related to human health, but little is known on its antifungal activity to plant fungal pathogens. Magnaporthe oryzae is a phytopathogenic fungus that causes rice blast, a devastating disease on rice. Here, we demonstrated that equol influences the development and pathogenicity of M. oryzae. Equol ...

To utilize effectively the growing number of verified genes that mediate an organism's ability to cause disease and/or to trigger host responses, we have developed PHI-base. This is a web-accessible database that currently catalogs 405 experimentally verified pathogenicity, virulence and effector genes from 54 fungal and Oomycete pathogens, of which 176 are from animal pathogens, 227 from plant...

Despite increasingly sophisticated microbiological techniques, and long after the first discovery of microbes, basic knowledge is still lacking to fully appreciate the ecological importance of microbial parasites in fish. This is likely due to the nature of their habitats as many species of fish suffer from living beneath turbid water away from easy recording. However, fishes represent key ecos...

Necrotrophic fungi are unable to occupy living plant cells. How such pathogens survive first contact with living host tissue and initiate infection is therefore unclear. Here, we show that the necrotrophic grey mold fungus Botrytis cinerea undergoes massive apoptotic-like programmed cell death (PCD) following germination on the host plant. Manipulation of an anti-apoptotic gene BcBIR1 modified ...