The evolution of plant-associated lifestyles in the Ascomycota and their effectors

The Ascomycota form the largest phylum in the fungal kingdom and show a wide diversity of
lifestyles, some involving beneficial or harmful associations with plants. Genomic methods can
provide insight into the genetic determinants of these lifestyles. Understanding evolutionary
transitions between fungal endophytes - species which live asymptomatically in plant tissues
- and fungal plant pathogens is of major significance in economic and ecological issues
relating to plant health.
To describe the evolutionary origins of the endophytic and plant pathogenic strategies, a
robust genomic phylogeny of the Ascomycota is needed with comprehensive taxon sampling.
By reconstructing lifestyles and host preferences across ancestral nodes of the phylogeny,
the patterns of evolutionary transitions between plant-associated species will be revealed.
This framework will also enable us to test hypotheses about how effector gene families have
evolved in independent plant-associated lineages. Effectors, fungal secreted proteins known
to play a role in pathogenesis, have been extensively studied in the context of plant-fungal
pathogenic interactions. The role of effector genes in the context of fungal endophytes could
shed light on the level of functional equivalence between plant pathogens and endophytes.