The growing world population requires an efficient management and control of diseases in crop production to guarantee both food security and safety (FAO, 2018; Sarrocco and Vannacci, 2018). The development of the so called NGS (Next Generation Sequencing) techniques has been positively welcomed as a new tool for understanding the nature of plant diseases, even if the potential for their use has not yet been fully discovered.

This Research Topic arises from the idea to give an updated and exhaustive overview of the exploitation of genome sequencing, genome comparison, transcriptomics, metagenomics, RNA based technologies, and genome editing strategies as a new frontier to contribute to plant disease management.