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Epigenetics has emerged as a potent field of study for understanding the factors influencing the effectiveness of human disease treatments and for identifying alternations induced by pathogens in host plants. However, there has been a paucity of research on the epigenetic control of the proliferation and pathogenicity of fungal plant pathogens. Fungal plant pathogens such as Magnaporthe oryzae, a significant threat to global rice production, provide an important model for exploring how epigenetic mechanisms govern fungal proliferation and virulence. In M. oryzae, epigenetic alterations, such as DNA methylation, histone modification, and non-coding RNAs, regulate gene expression patterns that influence the pathogen’s ability to infect its host. These modifications can enhance fungal adaptability, allowing the pathogen to survive in diverse environments and evade host immune responses. Our primary objective is to provide a comprehensive review of the existing epigenetic research on M. oryzae and shed light on how these changes influence the pathogen’s lifecycle, its ability to invade host tissues, and the overall severity of the disease. We begin by examining the epigenetic alterations occurring in M. oryzae and their contributions to the virulence and proliferation of the fungus. To advance our understanding of epigenetic mechanisms in M. oryzae and similar plant diseases, we emphasize the need to address unanswered questions and explore future research directions. This information is crucial for developing new antifungal treatments that target epigenetic pathways, which could lead to improved disease management.

Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) has been reported from potato production areas in Europe, USA, Japan and more frequently in regions with warm climates such as Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia and Syria. As it is considered as an uncommon virus in potato, the characterization of potato isolates of CMV is far behind those from other hosts. In addition to potato, CMV is a common virus infecting many crops in Syria, but nothing is known about its molecular characteristics. The present study aimed to characterize Syrian CMV isolates collected from potato and neighboring tobacco fields. All potato isolates of CMV (total of four) co-infected potato plants with Potato virus Y (PVY) which is the most frequent potato virus in Syria. According to the sequence analyses of the coat protein (CP) coding region, three potato and three tobacco CMV isolates were found to be closely related regardless of the host species or geographic origin, and all belonged to the IA strain subgroup of CMV. A potato CMV isolate, PoCMV7-5, readily infected solanaceous plants in which it induced systemic infection, but was less infectious to other hosts including those of Leguminosae and Cucurbitaceae. When inoculated on potato plants, PoCMV7-5 alone or with various PVY strains was able to cause local but not systemic infection in all potato cultivars inoculated. PoCMV7-5 contained heterogeneous variants of satellite RNA which varied in length due to A or/and T deletion/insertion at approximate nucleotide position 225‒240. This is the first report on CMV satellite RNA from potato.