Abstract Background Taro leaf blight, caused by a severely destructive oomycete fungus Phytophthora colocasiae , is responsible for threatening yield loss worldwide. The pathogen has the ability to germinate and spread rapidly other plants during favorable conditions resulting in acute decline even death, causing 100% crop loss. Farmers usually rely on highly toxic systemic fungicides control d...

The ubiquitous freshwater pathogen Saprolegnia parasitica has long been considered a true generalist, capable of infecting wide range fish species. It remains unclear, however, whether different isolates this pathogen, obtained from distinct geographic locations and host species, display differences in preference. To assess this, the current study examined induced zoospore encystment responses ...

In the order Chytridiales, Rhizophydium is a morphologically defined genus based upon the production of a monocentric, inoperculate, epibiotic sporangium, an endobiotic rhizoidal axis which branches, and an epibiotic resting spore. Despite its simple morphology, over 220 species of Rhizophydium have been described. Recent phylogenetic analyses using nuLSU rRNA (28 S rRNA) gene sequences of a ge...

Many pathogens infect more than one host species, and clarifying how these different hosts contribute to pathogen dynamics can facilitate the management of pathogens and can lend insight into the functioning of pathogens in ecosystems. In this study, we investigated a suite of native and non-native amphibian hosts of the pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) across multiple scales to ide...

The single calmodulin (CaM) gene and the corresponding cDNA of the chytridiomycete Blastocladiella emersonii were isolated and characterized. The CaM gene is interrupted by three introns and transcribed in a single 0.7-kb mRNA species encoding a predicted protein 91% identical to human CaM. B. emersonii CaM has been expressed in Escherichia coli as a fusion protein with gluthatione S-transferas...

To fully comprehend chytridiomycosis, the amphibian disease caused by the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), it is essential to understand how Bd affects amphibians throughout their remarkable range of life histories. Crawfish Frogs (Lithobates areolatus) are a typical North American pond-breeding species that forms explosive spring breeding aggregations in seasonal and semiper...