Ricerc@Sapienza

We initially devised this Research Topic (RT) as a valuable initiative to collect high-quality scientific articles from the participants of the 4th European Federation of Biotechnology (EFB) Microbial Stress meeting held in Kinsale, Ireland, April 2018. The scope of the RT is based on the scientific content of that “Microbial Stress: from Systems to Molecules and back” meeting. Indeed, over 40% of the articles eventually accepted for publication were contributed by meeting participants, but notably the remaining 60% was contributed by authors that work in this field.

The fungal genus Verticillium contains ten species, some of which are notorious plant pathogens causing vascular wilt diseases in host plants, while others are known as saprophytes and opportunistic plant pathogens. Whereas the genome of V. dahliae, the most notorious plant pathogen of the genus, has been well characterized, evolution and speciation of other members of the genus received little attention thus far. Here, we sequenced the genomes of the nine haploid Verticillium spp. to study evolutionary trajectories of their divergence from a last common ancestor.