When plants brace for the emerging pathogens

• Emerging and re-emerging phytopathogens are of global concern to plant health, productivity, and security.
• Bacteria, oomycetes, fungi, viruses, and nematodes lead this resurgence.
• Cross-kingdom host jumping and re-emerging pathogens pose serious threats to human health.
• Pathogenomics alongside inputs from other –omics approaches hold promise to understand them better.

Emerging phytopathogens ranging from viruses, bacteria, oomycetes, and fungi to nematodes have seriously threatened global crop productivity and food security, mostly owing to changing demographic dynamics and geographical movements of crops brought by human beings. An understanding of these new pathogens would allow timely intervention in biological control, phytosanitation, and biosecurity of crops and plants. With the flooding of information in the genomic era and with ensuing advances in other related ‘omics’, technologies would pave the path to improvement of plants to protect against the pathogens. We introduce the recently reported, emerging repertoire of phytopathogens, from diverse taxa such as fungi, oomycetes, bacteria, viruses, and nematodes, to the re-emerging ones and the cross-kingdom host jumping pathogens.