The Hyphal Tip

BBC news and GTO report the sequence of P. chrysogenum, will be published in October in Nat Biotechnology in a project based at the biotech company DSM. P. chrysogenum being the mold that fortuitously contaminated Dr Fleming’s bacterial plates.

The 13,500 reported genes in the press release is quite bit larger than relatives in the Aspergillus clade (~10,000 genes) so it will be intriguing to see what’s going on here and if there will be interesting examples of horizontal transfer like what has been investigated in Aspergillus oryzae. I am unclear as to whether the selected strain is a wild isolate or represents an industrial strain, but look forward to reading the full account of the genome.

Factoid - Most of the industrial fungal genome papers have seen publication in Nature Biotechnology (Aspergillus niger, Trichodermera reesei, and Phanerochaete chrysosporium).

Edit: 1-Oct-2008, Jonathan Badger, an author on the paper, blogs about the paper and links to the pre-print available on NBT site.

Mike Challen asks for anyone with [[Agaricus bisporus]] ESTs, BAC data, or mapping information to send them in the direction of the JGI to aid in the assembly and annotation of this mushroom genome.

In a paper appearing today in PLoS One, “The Fastest Flights in Nature: High-Speed Spore Discharge Mechanisms among Fungi” Nicholas Money and colleagues including 6 undergraduates and 3 graduate students, have measured the speed of flight of spores discharging from several Ascomycete and Zygomycete dung fungi.

NPR’s Science Friday covered fungi with several myco-luminaries on the radiowaves

Some tasty research if you are of the set who enjoy a good pint of beer. GenomeWebNews reports on study in Genome Research by Barbara Dunn and Gavin Sherlock at Stanford, looking at the history of lager yeast Saccharomyces pastorianus.

Jonathan Eisen investigates the genomics of a prez candidate’s name and finds a fungus…

A new paper in Genome Research from Borodovsky lab at Georgia Tech provides an improved ab initio gene prediction building on their previous program GeneMark called GeneMark.hmm ES.  This application doesn’t require a training set when building models for gene prediction in fungal genomes and reports to have as good or better sensitivity and specificity than most of the commonly used ab initio programs.

If you are interested in fungal genetics and genomics, comparative biology, and of course dancing with fungal geneticists, plan to attend the 25th Fungal Genetics Meeting held at the beautiful Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California. Below is info sent out from the Policy Committee and registration opens in a little over a month.  Budding (and conidiating) artists can also submit a Logo design