Editorial on the Research Topic Emergence and re-emergence of plant diseases caused by Xanthomonas speciesThe emergence and re-emergence of plant diseases has increased noticeably in recent years. This has been attributed to climate change, monoculture and trade (Willocquet et al., 2020). An example is the occurrence of Xylella fastidiosa in different regions of the world (Almeida and Nunney, 2015). It was described as a "relatively obscure pathogen" in 2002 (Hopkins and Purcell, 2002), but 10 years later it is now considered a major threat to agriculture worldwide.Xanthomonas species are members of the Lysobacteriaceae (previously known as Xanthomonaceae), a family within the class Gammaproteobacteria. They have an extremely wide host range, infecting both monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants. The number of first reports of novel Xanthomonas species or pathovars has increased in recent years (Bansai et al., 2022; Dia et al., 2022) as has the appearance of more aggressive strains of known species (Chen et al.). The same host has also been shown to harbor both pathogenic and non-pathogenic strains (Cesbron et al., 2015;Fernandes et al., 2021;Ramnarine et al., 2022). Furthermore, Xanthomonas species have been shown to have increased their host and geographic range (Curland et al., 2020;Sigillo et al., 2021). Horizontal gene transfer has been identified as one potential mechanism favouring host-range evolution (Chen et al., 2018).Xanthomonas species can colonize novel hosts and inhabit unique ecological niches due to their extensive genomic diversity. This rich diversity has been shown to possibly be linked to different production systems (Abrahamian et al., 2019;Klein-Gordon et al., 2021) and cultivated regions (Chen et al., 2021). Xanthomonas species are also an Frontiers in Microbiology frontiersin.org