The Hyphal Tip: Fungal Genomes and Comparative Genomics

When first discovered, the gene LaeA was thought to be a master switch for silencing of several NRPS secondary metabolite gene clusters in Aspergillus. NRPS and PKS are important genes in filamentous fungi as they produce many compounds that likely help fungi compete in the ecological niche mycotoxins (e.g. aflatoxin, gliotoxin)...

The JGI has released the genome sequence and annotation of the Basidiomycete brown rot Postia placenta. Brown rotters can only break down cellulose but do not degrade lignin that white rotters (like Phanerochaete chrysosporium). Using total genomic DNA from dikaryotic strain MAD-698, the JGI generated 571,000 reads that assembled into 1243 haplotype scaffolds, with 85 of these scaffolds covering half of the genome sequence.

A exciting research paper "Control of alternative RNA splicing and gene expression by eukaryotic riboswitches" published in Nature details the mechanism of how riboswitches work in Neurospora crassa. While riboswitches have been found and studied in bacteria there has not been extensive work showing how they work in fungi. In bacteria the riboswitch acts as the direct interacting sensor that switches gene

Take a guess: what's the world's largest organism? No, it's not Yao Ming. While the Guiness Book of World Records hasn't weighed in on this issue, scientists out of Oregon State University say that an Armillaria ostoyae individual residing in Oregon's Blue Mountains is the largest living organism on the planet. Covering 2,200 acres, this tree killing fungus certainly is big.

A nice evolutionary analysis of peroxin genes entitled PEX Genes in Fungal Genomes: Common, Rare, or Redundant in the journal "Traffic" from Kiel et al out of the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. Within a species, the genes in the PEX family are not necessarily phylogenetically related to each other, but instead are all named as to how they were discovered in mutant screens.

In his book Jurassic Park, Micheal Crichton imagines the possibility to extracting dinosaur DNA from mosquitos entombed in amber and using the extracts to genetically engineer T-rex and Compies alike. A recent discovery by an avid amber collector and scientists at Oregon State University may help enrich this park of the future: they found a 9 nine-hundredths-inch-long mushroom cap encased in a 100 million year piece of amber.