Verticillium dahliae preserves the ancestral or cryptical sexual ability

Verticillium dahliae, a pathogen that causes Verticillium wilt on many economically important crops, is an obligately asexual fungus and no sexual stage has been found for over hundred years. However, two important of characteristics prevalent in obligate sexual fungi are conserved in V. dahliae: 1) the presence of two mating-types (heterothallic) with functional mating-type genes in the populations; and 2) most genes responsible for sexual reproduction in addition to the two mating-type genes are also conserved in V. dahliae. Therefero, V. dahliae should preserves the ancestral or cryptical sexual ability that caused the mutiple and complex population structures at present. Here, we provide a high-quality reference genome for the MAT1-1 strain S011 and MAT1-2 strain S023 isolated from sunflower in same field of Inner Mongolia, China. This novel resource will support our future genomic characteristics analysis of MAT1-1 strain, and supply valuable clues for us to detect the sexual and asexual reproduction mechanism of V. dahlaie, and is important to uncover the V. dahlaie had the ancestral sexual or still preserves cryptic sexual at present.