Investigating the Smuts: Common Cues, Signaling Pathways, and the Role of in Dimorphic Switching and Pathogenesis.

The corn smut fungus serves as a model species for studying fungal dimorphism and its role in phytopathogenic development. The pathogen has two growth phases: a saprobic yeast phase and a pathogenic filamentous phase. Dimorphic transition of involves complex processes of signal perception, mating, and cellular reprogramming. Recent advances in improvement of reference genomes, high-throughput sequencing and molecular genetics studies have been expanding research in this field. However, the biology of other non-model species is frequently overlooked. This leads to uncertainty regarding how much of what is known in is applicable to other dimorphic fungi. In this review, we will discuss dimorphic fungi in the aspects of physiology, reproductive biology, genomics, and molecular genetics. We also perform comparative analyses between and other fungi in Ustilaginomycotina, the subphylum to which belongs. We find that lipid/hydrophobicity is a potential common cue for dimorphic transition in plant-associated dimorphic fungi. However, genomic profiles alone are not adequate to explain dimorphism across different fungi.