Alexandros Georgios Sotiropoulos was born in 1992 in Kozani, Greece. He studied Biology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He continued his studies by completing a Masters in Science in Medical Virology at the University of Manchester, UK. Last year, he completed his PhD at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, working mostly on the evolution, diversity and genomics of the wheat powdery mildew fungus. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Crop Health, University of Southern Queensland in Australia.
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Global genomic analyses of wheat powdery mildew reveal association of pathogen spread with historical human migration and trade
A. G. SOTIROPOULOS 1,2 , E. ARANGO-ISAZA 3 , T. BAN 4 , C. BARBIERI 3,5 , S. BOURRAS 1,6 , C. COWGER 7 , P. C. CZEMBOR 8 , R. BEN-DAVID 9 , A. DINOOR 10 , S. R. ELLWOOD 11 , J. GRAF 1 , K. HATTA 12 , M. HELGUERA 13 , J. SÁNCHEZ-MARTÍN 1 , B. A. MCDONALD 14 , A. I. MORGOUNOV 15 , M. C. MÜLLER 1 , V. SHAMANIN 16 , K. K. SHIMIZU 3,4 , T. YOSHIHIRA 17 , H. ZBINDEN 1 , B. KELLER 1 , T. WICKER 1
The fungus Blumeria graminis f. sp. tritici causes wheat powdery mildew disease. We have studied its spread and evolution by analyzing a global sample of 172 mildew genomes. Our population genomics analyses (including admixture, diversity and coalescence analyses etc.) show that B.g. tritici emerged in the Fertile Crescent during wheat domestication. After hexaploid wheat mildew spread throughout Eurasia, colonization brought it to America, where it hybridized with unknown grass mildew species. Recent trade brought USA powdery mildew strains to Japan, and European strains to China, where in both places, they hybridized with local ancestral strains. Thus, although mildew spreads by wind regionally, our results indicate that humans drove its global spread throughout history and that mildew rapidly evolved through hybridization.
- Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- Centre for Crop Health, University of Southern Queensland, Darling Heights, 4350, Queensland, Australia
- Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Zurich Switzerland
- Kihara Institute for Biological Research, Yokohama City University, Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan
- Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig 04103, Germany
- Department of Forest Mycology and Plant Pathology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden
- USDA-ARS Department of Plant Pathology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA
- Plant Breeding and Acclimatization Institute - National Research Institute, Radzików, 05-870 Błonie, Poland
- Department of Vegetables and Field crops, Institute of Plant Sciences, ARO-Volcani Center, Rishon LeZion 7528809, Israel
- Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, The Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food & Environment, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel
- Centre for Crop and Disease Management, School of Molecular and Life Sciences, Curtin University, Bentley, WA 6102, Australia
- Hokkaido Agricultural Research Center Field Crop Research and Development, National Agricultural Research Organization, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan
- Centro de Investigaciones Agropecuarias (CIAP), INTA, Córdoba, Argentina
- Plant Pathology, Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
- Omsk State Agrarian University, Omsk, Russia
- Department of Sustainable Agriculture, Rakuno Gakuen University, Ebetsu, Hokkaido, Japan