The spores rapidly germinate to produce long, branching threadlike structures, called hyphae.

The hyphae invade the leaf, using specialised branches to gain entry to the outermost layer of cells on the leaves.

The hyphae rapidly colonize the leaves and begin to produce asexual fruiting bodies.

[2] Parastagonospora nodorum is an experimentally tractable organism, which is easily handled in defined media.

[4] Functional genomics investigations by the Solomon group have dissected the roles of several, by disabling them and observing how they fail.