Domestication provides an excellent framework for studying adaptive divergence. Using population genomics and phenotypic assays, we reconstructed the domestication history of the blue cheese mould Penicillium roqueforti. We showed that this fungus was domesticated twice independently. The population used in Roquefort originated from an old domestication event associated with weak bottlenecks and exhibited traits beneficial for...

Study of the congruence of population genetic structure between hosts and pathogens gives important insights into their shared phylogeographical and coevolutionary histories. We studied the population genetic structure of castrating anther‐smut fungi (genus Microbotryum ) and of their host plants, the Silene nutans species complex, and the morphologically and genetically closely related Silene italica , which can be found in s...

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...

The competitive exclusion principle postulates that different species can only coexist in sympatry if they occupy distinct ecological niches. The goal of this study was to understand the geographical distribution of three species of Microbotryum anther‐smut fungi that are distantly related but infect the same host plants, the sister species Silene vulgaris and S. uniflora, in Western Europe. We used microsatellite markers to i...

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...

Cold‐adapted organisms with current arctic–alpine distributions have persisted during the last glaciation in multiple ice‐free refugia, leaving footprints in their population structure that contrast with temperate plants and animals. However, pathogens that live within hosts having arctic–alpine distributions have been little studied. Here, we therefore investigated the geographical range and population structure of a fungus p...