The rust fungi (Uredinales, Basidiomycota) are an expansive and diverse group of fungal species, consisting of approximately 7000 different species in over 160 different genera. Fungi of the genus Puccinia represent a large proportion of these rust fungi, many species of which are well known for their role in causing massive yield and subsequent economic losses in agricultural crops worldwide. ...

The implications of global population growth urge transformation of current food and bioenergy production systems to sustainability. Members of the family Poaceae are of particular importance both in food security and for their applications as biofuel substrates. For centuries, rust fungi have threatened the production of valuable crops such as wheat, barley, oat, and other small grains; simila...

Fungal spores are continuously deposited on the leaf surfaces by wind impaction, sedimentation and rain wash-out from the atmosphere and splash-dispersal. They reside and act as asymptomatic mutualists, benign commensals or latent pathogens. A slight imbalance in this relation can lead to pathogenic phase of the fungi, resulting in a variety of symptoms on leaves viz. discoloration, blight, soo...

, Rust fungi are important plant pathogens, infecting taxonomically diverged plant taxa such as angiospermes, gymnospermes and also some pteridophytes. Though members of all families of spermatophytes are infected by rusts, it is interesting that members of the Poaceae, Leguminosae and Compositae are the dominating hosts. Many of the plants are economically important crops such as maize, wheat,...

Rust fungi are plant parasites which colonise host tissue with an intercellular mycelium that forms haustoria within living plant cells. To identify genes expressed during biotrophic growth, EST sequencing was performed with a haustorium-specific cDNA library from Uromyces fabae. One thousand seventeen ESTs were generated, which assembled into 530 contigs. Several of the most frequently represe...

Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum herbicide used for the control of weeds in glyphosate-resistant crops. Glyphosate inhibits 5-enolpyruvyl shikimate 3-phosphate synthase, a key enzyme in the synthesis of aromatic amino acids in plants, fungi, and bacteria. Studies with glyphosate-resistant wheat have shown that glyphosate provided both preventive and curative activities against Puccinia striiformi...

The biotrophic rust fungi Puccinia hordei and Puccinia striiformis are important barley pathogens with the potential to cause high yield losses through an epidemic spread. The identification of QTL conferring resistance to these pathogens is the basis for targeted breeding approaches aiming to improve stripe rust and leaf rust resistance of modern cultivars. Exploiting the allelic richness of w...

Over 100 genes of resistance to rust fungi: Puccinia recondita f. sp. tritici, (47 Lr - leaf rust genes), P. striiformis (18 Yr - yellow rust genes) and P. graminis f. sp. tritici (41 Sr - stripe rust genes) have been identified in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and its wild relatives according to recent papers. Sixteen Lr resistance genes have been mapped using restriction fragments length polym...