Ustilago tritici causes loose smut, which is a seed-borne fungal disease of wheat, and responsible for yield losses up to 40%. Loose smut is a threat to seed production in developing countries where small scale farmers use their own harvest as seed material. The killer protein 4 (KP4) is a virally encoded toxin from Ustilago maydis and inhibits growth of susceptible races of fungi from the Usti...

Ceraceosorus bombacis is an early-diverging lineage of smut fungi and a pathogen of cotton trees (Bombax ceiba). To study the evolutionary genomics of smut fungi in comparison with other fungal and oomycete pathogens, the genome of C. bombacis was sequenced and comparative genomic analyses were performed. The genome of 26.09 Mb encodes for 8,024 proteins, of which 576 are putative-secreted effe...

Fungal diseases of plants represent one of the most eminent threats to agriculture. Given the food needs of a growing world population and that more and more crops are devoted to fuel production, the necessity to develop crops with better resistance to disease is increasing. To accomplish this, the mechanisms that plant pathogenic fungi use to colonize plants need to be elucidated. As of now, t...

Response of near-isogenic sorghum lines, differing at the P locus for plant colour, to grain mould and head smut fungi" (2013). Abstract Leaves and stalks of many sorghum genotypes accumulate dark red or purple pigments upon wounding while some plants, called 'tan,' do not. Grains with unpigmented 'white' pericarps grown on tan plants are more desirable for food. The hypothesis tested was that ...

In the present study, previous reported smut fungi of Iran were reviewed. For this purpose, all specimens being present in the fungus section of Herbarium Ministerii Iranici Agriculturae "IRAN" as well as some newly collected ones were studied. Moreover, all taxonomic and or floristic papers so far published for smut fungi of Iran, were considered. Important characteristics such as: host plant(...

Ustilago hordei is a biotrophic parasite of barley (Hordeum vulgare). After seedling infection, the fungus persists in the plant until head emergence when fungal spores develop and are released from sori formed at kernel positions. The 26.1-Mb U. hordei genome contains 7113 protein encoding genes with high synteny to the smaller genomes of the related, maize-infecting smut fungi Ustilago maydis...

BACKGROUND Anther-smut fungi belonging to the genus Microbotryum sterilize their host plants by aborting ovaries and replacing pollen by fungal spores. Sibling Microbotryum species are highly specialized on their host plants and they have been widely used as models for studies of ecology and evolution of plant pathogenic fungi. However, most studies have focused, so far, on M. lychnidis-dioicae...

We investigated two alternative hypotheses for the origin of crop pathogen species: that human-mediated agricultural practices drove the divergence of many crop plant pathogen species or that coevolutionary processes in natural populations of the crops' ancestors drove divergence of pathogen species. We distinguished between these two hypotheses by constructing a robust multigene phylogeny and ...

Study of smut fungi on Liliaceae resulted to propose a new genus and three new combinations: Vankya Ershad, type V. ornithogali (Schmidt et Kunze) Ershad, based on Uredo ornithogali Schmidt et Kunze, V. heufleri (Fuckel) Ershad, based on Ustilago heufleri Fuckel, and V. vaillantii (L.-R. et C. Tulasne) Ershad, based on Ustilago vaillantii L.-R. et C. Tulasne.