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...

Introgression arising from crop‐to‐wild gene flow provides novel sources of genetic variation in plant species complexes. Hybridization within the Beta vulgaris species complex is of immediate concern; crop lineages ( B . vulgaris ssp. vulgaris ) hybridize easily with their wild relatives ( B . vulgaris ssp. maritima ) thereby threatening wild beet gene diversity with genetic swamping. Hybridization ‘hotspots’ occur in Europea...

Patterns of seed dispersal in the wild sea beet ( Beta vulgaris ssp. maritima ) are predicted to be influenced by marine currents because populations are widely distributed along the European Atlantic coast. We investigated the potential influence of marine currents on the pattern of spatial genetic structuring in natural populations of sea beet. Populations were located along the French coasts of the Anglo‐Norman gulf that fe...