Phakopsora pachyrhizi causes soybean rust, which is the most devastating foliar disease responsible for significant losses of soybean crop in Africa, Asia, Australia and South America. The pathogen was recently found for the first time in the continental U.S.A., becoming a major threat to U.S. soybean production. Here, we present an update on the P. pachyrhizi Genome Sequencing Project and a preliminary report of the comparative analysis of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) generated from four specific-stages of P. pachyrhizi using unidirectional cDNA libraries.
