Recent advances in the field of sequencing technologies and bioinformatics allow a more rapid access to genomes of non-model organisms at sinking costs. Accordingly, draft genomes of several economically important cereal rust fungi have been released in the last 3 years. Aside from the very recent flax rust and poplar rust draft assemblies there are no genomic data available for other dicot-infecting rust fungi. In this article we outline rust fungus sequencing efforts and comment on the current status of Phakopsora pachyrhizi (Asian soybean rust) genome sequencing.
Keywords: Asian soybean rust; fungal genomics; genome size; herterozygosity; k-mer analysis; next-generation sequencing; rust fungi.