This book brings together twelve chapters on fungal pathogens with the goal of presenting an overview of the current areas of activity and the common themes that pervade research on these important organisms. The timing of the book is appropriate because we have gained sufficient insight from molecular genetic analyses to begin to make some comparisons between different fungal pathogens and to discuss the key advances that have been made. The chapters provide a broad survey of the important topics in fungal pathogenesis including morphogenesis, virulence, avirulence, and signaling. The reader...

The pace of research on fungi has been accelerating over the past decade. As a result, molecular, biochemical and cell biological studies have opened up new areas of investigation for many of the most important fungal pathogens of crop plants. Similarly, these approaches have provided new information on fungal pathogens of animals and insects, and on fungal endophytes. The collection of chapters in this book provides an excellent update on recent progress for many of the important plant pathogenic fungi that either cause significant economic problems or that serve as useful experimental...