Melampsora lini infection of flax. Image provided by Dr. Peter Dodds

Rust fungi are one of the largest and most destructive groups of plant pathogens. They are obligate biotrophs which require a living host for survival.

Melampsora lini, the causal agent of flax rust, has long been recognized as a model system for studying host-pathogen interactions (Flor, 1955). This HiFi assembly of the dikaryotic flax rust genome is an improvement over the previously assembled short-read version (Nemri et al., 2014) and is phased to assess haplotype diversity.