Benjamin Schwessinger

This study shows that wheat- and barley-adapted Puccinia striiformis can sexually hybridize on a shared alternate host, producing progeny with novel host phenotypes.

The paper identifies a novel class of resistance genes in Myrtaceae, TNJ, characterized by Jacalin domains replacing LRRs, and suggests their role in pathogen recognition.

This paper presents the first chromosome-scale, haplotype-resolved nuclear genome assembly for Chiloglottis trapeziformis, revealing structural variation and repeat-rich features.

The paper presents a high-quality, haplotype-resolved genome assembly of the barley stripe rust pathogen Puccinia striiformis f. sp. hordei using long-read and Hi-C sequencing.

The paper tracks global spread and hybridization of wheat yellow rust pathogen, identifying nuclear reassortment and intercontinental movement as key drivers of evolution and disease impact.

The paper clones AvrYr7, an effector gene in wheat stripe rust, and identifies variants that evade recognition by the resistance gene Yr7 through sequence and expression differences.

The paper identifies a wheat resistance gene Lr41 that directly recognizes an effector AvrLr41 through its pseudokinase domain, revealing a non-canonical immune mechanism involving kinase-type receptors and helper proteins.

The paper identifies an AvrPstB48 effector from stripe rust fungus that triggers defence responses in wheat but does not directly correlate with disease outcomes.

This study presents a chromosome-level genome of Austropuccinia psidii, revealing its unique genomic features and infection dynamics across diverse hosts.

This study benchmarks species classification of fungal ITS metabarcodes using ONT long-read sequencing, showing that threshold-based and machine learning classifiers outperform others in accuracy and consistency.

The paper uses long-read genomics to study dikaryotic fungus genome biology, revealing nuclear-specific evolution and allele-specific expression.

The paper investigates how intragenomic variants of an effector gene influence early infection in the rust fungus Austropuccinia psidii.

The paper develops a yeast biosensor to optimize protein secretion by screening combinations of promoters, signal peptides, and terminators.

The paper analyzes genome architecture divergence in Eucalyptus species using long-read sequencing to show that rearrangements drive sequence divergence after lineage separation.

This study develops a diagnostic method using mating-type HD locus alleles to identify new incursions of the myrtle rust pathogen Austropuccinia psidii.

The paper identifies and characterizes interspecies structural variants in Eucalyptus species, revealing their role in genetic differentiation and adaptive divergence.

The paper presents a chromosome-level pseudo-phased genome for Melaleuca quinquenervia and identifies allelic diversity in NLR-type resistance genes using a novel pipeline.

The paper compares methods for identifying fungal species from sequencing data and finds that aligning sequences to a fungi-specific database with coverage cutoffs improves accuracy.

This paper demonstrates that linked machine learning classifiers improve species classification of fungi using error-prone long-reads on extended metabarcodes, achieving high recall and low false positives.

The paper identifies and corrects phase switches in Hi-C data for dikaryotic fungus assemblies using Nanopore and HiFi sequencing, showing HiFi's superiority in phasing low heterozygosity genomes.

This paper reports the assembly of a large, highly contiguous genome for Austropuccinia psidii, revealing its expansion through transposable elements and low GC content.

The paper presents a draft genome assembly of Eucalyptus pauciflora using long and short-read data and evaluates four assemblers to identify the best assembly.

The paper shows that the Ug99 wheat stem rust pathogen emerged through somatic hybridisation and nuclear exchange between dikaryons, with one haploid nucleus genotype shared with an older African lineage.

The paper identifies a horizontally transferred 14kb genomic element containing the virulence gene ToxA among three fungal wheat pathogens, revealing transposon-mediated transfer and decay processes.

The paper evaluates chloroplast genome assembly methods using Eucalyptus pauciflora, finding that hybrid long- and short-read assemblies are most accurate.

The paper presents an open-source workflow for establishing MinION long-read sequencing in any laboratory, achieving >8.5 Gb of data with mean read length 13 kb and N50 26 kb.

This study presents haplotype-phased genome assemblies of two dikaryotic Puccinia coronata f. sp. avenae isolates, revealing structural variation and heterozygous SNPs, and identifies co-expressed effector candidates associated with virulence differences.