Population genetic analysis has provided fresh insights leading to revisions in disease cycles and control methods for many important pathogens. In this course clear explanations are provided for the five evolutionary forces (mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, reproduction system, and selection) and many examples are presented illustrating how these forces operate alone and in combination to determine the genetic structure of populations of plant pathogens. In addition, the final section of the course shows how to apply knowledge of pathogen population genetics to improve management of plant diseases.Population Genetics of Plant Pathogens CD-Rom is an excellent educational aid for training the next generation of plant pathologists as well as better informing the current generation of plant health practitioners. Plant Pathology students, teachers, and professionals; instructors and practitioners of Plant Breeding; and departments of Plant Pathology and Agronomy will all benefit from the expert knowledge provided in this new teaching tool.

Informs the agricultural and scientific community of the outcome of the meeting of the British Society for Plant Pathology held at Leeds, which brought together international experts in the population dynamics and population genetics of plant pathogens.

A broad view of plant-pathogen interactions illustrating the fundamental reciprocal role pathogens and hosts play in shaping each other's ecology and evolution.

As befits a volume in the Advanced Series in Agricultural Sciences, this book was written with problems of practical agriculture in mind. One of the ways of controlling plant disease is by using resistant cultivars; and from the wide literature of genetics and biochemistry in plant pathology I have emphasized what seems to bear most closely on breeding for disease resistance. This has a double advantage, for it happens all to the good that this emphasis is also an emphasis on primary causes of disease, as distinct from subsequent processes of symptom expression and other secondary effects. The chapters are entirely modern in outlook. The great revolution in biology this century had its high moments in the elucidation of the DNA double helix in 1953 and the deciphering of the genetic code in 1961. This book, so far as I know, is the first in plant pathology to be conceived within the framework of this new biology. Half the book could not have been written 20 years ago, even if there had then been available all the literature that has since accumulated on the genetics and chemistry of plant disease. The new biology is the cement this book uses to bind the literature together. Another feature of this book is an emphasis on thermodynamics.

Far from being passive elements in the landscape, plants have developed many sophisticated chemical and mechanical means of deterring organisms that seek to prey on them. This volume draws together research from ecology, evolution, agronomy, and plant pathology to produce an ecological genetics perspective on plant resistance in both natural and agricultural systems. By emphasizing the ecological and evolutionary basis of resistance, the book makes an important contribution to the study of how phytophages and plants coevolve. Plant Resistance to Herbivores and Pathogens not only reviews the literature pertaining to plant resistance from a number of traditionally separate fields but also examines significant questions that will drive future research. Among the topics explored are selection for resistance in plants and for virulence in phytophages; methods for studying natural variation in plant resistance; the factors that maintain intraspecific variation in resistance; and the ecological consequences of within-population genetic variation for herbivorous insects and fungal pathogens. "A comprehensive review of the theory and information on a large, rapidly growing, and important subject."—Douglas J. Futuyma, State University of New York, Stony Brook