Fungal Genomes and Comparative Genomics

(Truffle picture from BBC.com) The BBC (link) has an interesting article about a  Chinese Black truffle being found as an invasive species in Italy. The Italian's and European truffle aficionados are worried that the Chinese Black Truffle will outcompete the Perigord Black truffle, which is supposed to be very tasty and the second most expensive truffle by weight, behind only the Piedmont White Truffle. The scientific journal article (link) the BBC cites is present in the new phytologist and was authored by a lab from the "Dipartimento di Biologia Vegetale dell’Università di Torino. Looks like the Chinese truffle species could be a good invasive species model and also economically important. Truffles are interesting its amazing people would pay so much for a mushroom, sadly I can't say if one tastes better than the other since I have not had the chance to try of the truffles mentioned above.

The T. reesei genome paper was recently published in Nature Biotechnology from Diego Martinez at LANL with collaborators at JGI, LBNL, and others. This fungus was chosen for sequencing because it was found on canvas tents eating the cotton material suggesting it may be a good candidate for degrading cellulose plant material as part of cellulosic

Paul Stamets thinks so and he's done work to make this happen.  The founder of FungiPerfecti and author many books on mushroom cultivation spoke at a TED talk recently that is worth taking a look. 

The genome of Podospora anserina S mat+ strain was sequenced by Genoscope and CNRS and published recently in Genome Biology. The genome sequence data has been available for several years, but it is great to see a publication describing the findings.  The 10X genome assembly with ~10,000 genes provides an important dataset for comparisons

Depleted uranium (DU) from spent ammunition used in the conflicts in Iraq and the Balkans poses a health risk to the inhabitants of those regions. This paper in Current Biology from Marina Fomina et al shows that several species of fungi including one from the mycorrhizal genus Rhizopogon

Neil has a great summary of the results from the Platypus genome sequencing project.

The transcriptional landscape of yeast has been (further) defined with Solexa sequencing in a method deemed "RNA-Seq", but what I would call "deep EST sequencing".  This approach for transcriptional profiling by sequencing alone is sure to be used by many labs looking for lower and more complete ways to describe and quantitate the full population of transcripts in an organism.

NYT article on the work of Paul Stamets using fungi like Pleurotus for Dioxin cleanup in Ft Bragg, CA.

Thanks for the link Pat!

Spread of wheat rust Puccinia strain Ug99 and consequences on already strained food supplies is discussed in an Op-Ed piece covered in GeneticMaize

A paper in Science from Jason Crawford and colleagues explores the function of polyketide synthetases (PKS) in the synthesis of the secondary metabolite and carcinogen aflatoxin. Previous work (nicely reviewed in the fungi by Nancy Keller and colleagues) has shown the the PKS genes have several domains. These domains include acyl carrier protein (ACP), transacylase (SAT), ketosynthase (KS), malonyl-CoA:ACP transacylase (MAT), “product template” PT, Aand thioesterase/Claisen cyclase (TE/CLC).