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Discovering Mechanisms Driving Adaptive Evolution In The Cross-Kingdom Fungal Pathogen Fusarium Oxysporum, Dilay Hazal Ayhan

Doctoral Dissertations

Fusarium oxysporum is a cross-kingdom pathogenic fungus that can cause vascular wilt disease in many economically important plants and local or disseminated infections in humans. Although it lacks a sexual stage in its life cycle, F. oxysporum can adapt to a wide range of hosts because of accessory chromosomes (ACs) which are enriched in host-specific genes and repeat content. This dissertation investigates the mechanisms that drive the adaptive evolution in the cross-kingdom pathogen F. oxysporum using comparative genomics and an experimental evolution approach. The first chapter compares phenotypes and genomes of a plant pathogenic isolate F. oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici …