Taxonomy and Identification, Evolution and Comparative Fungal Genomics of Plant Pathogenic Fungi

Dear Colleagues, 

Fungi is a kingdom that includes a large number of pathogens that have an enormous impact on the production and quality of food, fiber, and biofuel crops worldwide. Plant pathogens threaten food security and cause great economic losses, and when engaging in international trade regulations have to be implemented restricting the introduction and spread of plant pathogens. A fundamental aspect to all of these concerns is the accurate identification of pathogens. The identification of fungal species needs to be accurate and precise because it should predict the properties that are required for applications, especially in plant pathology.

However, among fungi, species delimitation is frequently subjective because it depends on the choice of a species concept and its criteria. The accurate identification of plant pathogens is still a challenging task based on varying criteria such as morphological, physiological, mating, and/or molecular features. It is often difficult to compare fungal taxonomic groups defined based on different species recognition criteria for separating closely related species. Moreover, although phylogenetic analysis using one or a few loci sequences have been made for DNA sequence-based classification and identification, a consensus has not been reached due to intrinsic limitations.

With the development of whole genome sequencing techniques, over 5600 fungal genome sequences are available in NCBI, representing over 1000 fungal species, including multiple strains in each of several closely related species that are of economic significance. It is an inevitable trend to define the species concept from morphological, multigene-based, and whole genome sequence-based classification. With the increasing fungal genome sequences, a large number of candidate genes potentially related to morphological, ecological, physiological, and reproductive differences among closely related, as well as divergent, species will be revealed for application in regulatory plant health.

In this Special Issue, the following topics can be presented: species concepts in fungi; identification of plant pathogenic fungi; fungal DNA barcoding and sequence-based classification and identification; and whole genome sequence-based classification and identification. In addition, potential authors are invited to submit original research articles, review articles, opinion papers, and short communications.

Dr. Jingze Zhang
Prof. Dr. Guangyu Sun
Guest Editors

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• species concepts
• trait evolution
• comparative genomics
• species recognition
• phylogenomics