Publication Date:
2024-04-08
Description:
Several plant pathogenic Parastagonospora species have been identified infecting wheat and other
cereals over the past 50 years. As new lineages were discovered, naming conventions grew unwieldy and the
relationships with previously recognized species remained unclear. We used genome sequencing to clarify relationships among these species and provided new names for most of these species. Six of the nine described Parastagonospora species were recovered from wheat, with five of these species coming from Iran. Genome sequences
revealed that three strains thought to be hybrids between P. nodorum and P. pseudonodorum were not actually
hybrids, but rather represented rare gene introgressions between those species. Our data are consistent with the
hypothesis that P. nodorum originated as a pathogen of wild grasses in the Fertile Crescent, then emerged as a
wheat pathogen via host-tracking during the domestication of wheat in the same region. The discovery of a diverse
array of Parastagonospora species infecting wheat in Iran suggests that new wheat pathogens could emerge from
this region in the future.
Keywords:
Ecology
;
Evolution
;
Behavior and Systematics
Repository Name:
National Museum of Natural History, Netherlands
Type:
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Format:
application/pdf
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