Functional genomics in the rice blast fungus to unravel the fungal pathogenicity.

A rapidly growing number of successful genome sequencing projects in plant pathogenic fungi greatly increase the demands for tools and methodologies to study fungal pathogenicity at genomic scale. Magnaporthe oryzae is an economically important plant pathogenic fungus whose genome is fully sequenced. Recently we have reported the development and application of functional genomics platform technologies in M. oryzae. This model approach would have many practical ramifications in design and implementation of upcoming functional genomics studies of filamentous fungi aimed at understanding fungal pathogenicity.