Multiple infections (co‐occurrence of multiple pathogen genotypes within an individual host) can have important impacts on diseases. Relatedness among pathogens can affect the likelihood of multiple infections and their consequences through kin selection. Previous studies on the castrating anther‐smut fungus Microbotryum lychnidis‐dioicae have shown that multiple infections occur in its host plant Silene latifolia . Relatednes...

Identifying the genes underlying adaptation, their distribution in genomes and the evolutionary forces shaping genomic diversity are key challenges in evolutionary biology. Very few studies have investigated the abundance and distribution of selective sweeps in species with high‐quality reference genomes, outside a handful of model species. Pathogenic fungi are tractable eukaryote models for investigating the genomics of adapt...

Nuclear disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima provide examples of effects of acute ionizing radiation on mutations that can affect the fitness and distribution of species. Here, we investigated the prevalence of Microbotryum lychnidis‐dioicae , a pollinator‐transmitted fungal pathogen of plants causing anther‐smut disease in Chernobyl, its viability, fertility and karyotype variation, and the accumulation of nonsynonymous mutat...

Fungal invasions are increasingly recognized as a significant component of global changes, threatening ecosystem health and damaging food production. Invasive fungi also provide excellent models to evaluate the generality of results based on other eukaryotes. We first consider here the reasons why fungal invasions have long been overlooked: they tend to be inconspicuous, and inappropriate methods have been used for species rec...

Pearl millet ( Pennisetum glaucum ) is a staple crop in Sahelian Africa. Farmers usually grow varieties with different cycle lengths and complementary functions in Sahelian agrosystems. Both the level of genetic differentiation of these varieties and the domestication history of pearl millet have been poorly studied. We investigated the neutral genetic diversity and population genetic structure of early‐ and late‐flowering dom...

Unravelling the mechanisms involved in adaptation to understand plant morphological evolution is a challenging goal. For crop species, identification of molecular causal polymorphisms involved in domestication traits is central to this issue. Pearl millet, a domesticated grass mostly found in semi‐arid areas of Africa and India, is an interesting model to address this topic: the domesticated form shares common derived phenotyp...