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For your reading pleasure

Too much on my plate as of late, so I’m woefully behind on posting much on interesting papers or news.  Here’s a short list of links and papers that are worth a look though.

“Evolution of pathogenicity and sexual reproduction in eight Candida genomes” published (Nature)
NYT Science article sort of summarizing the good, bad, and ugly of fungi [...]

N.crassa lineage specific genes

Take a look at this post by Larry Moran on Takao Kasuga’s paper on phylogenetic distribution of genes in N. crassa genome. [...]

First release of N.tetrasperma and N.discreta

The JGI in collaboration with our lab at Berkeley have released the Neurospora tetrasperma (mat A) and N. discreta (mat A) genome sequences and annotation after about two years of work.  These are two closely related species to the well studied laboratory workhorse Neurospora crassa.

The N.tetrasperma assembly (8X) has an N50 of 976kb and is [...]

Fungal genome assembly from short-read sequences

This is a research blog so I though I’d post some quick numbers we are seeing for de novo assembly of the [[Neurospora crassa]] genome using Velvet. The genome of N.crassa is about 40Mb and sequencing of several flow cells using Solexa/Illumina technology to see what kind of de novo reconstruction we’d get. [...]

Trichoderma reesei genome paper published

TrichodermaThe [[Trichoderma 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 ethanol [...]

Podospora genome published

P.anserinaThe 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 [...]

More RIP without sex?

Another asexual species of fungi also has evidence for the meiosis-specific process of Repeat Induced Point-mutations (RIP). [...]

DuPont donates genome sequence of maize pathogen

DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred has donated the genome sequence of the Sordariomycete Colletotrichum graminicola into the public domain by depositing the sequence in GenBank.  The FGI through the Broad Institute are also sequencing a strain of C. graminicola (teleomorph Glomerella [...]

RIPing in an asexual fungus

ResearchBlogging.orgA.niger conidiophoreA paper in Current Genetics describes the discovery of Repeat Induced Polymorphism (RIP) in two Euriotiales fungi.  RIP has been extensively studied in Neurospora crassa and has been identified in other Sordariomycete fungi Magnaporthe, Fusiarium. This is not the first Aspergillus species to have RIP described as it was demonstrated in the biotech workhorse Aspergillus oryzae.  However, I think this study is the first to describe RIP in a putatively asexual fungus.  The evidence for RIP is only found in transposon sequences in the Aspergillus and Penicillium.  A really interesting aspect of this discovery is RIP is thought to only occur during sexual stage, but a sexual state has never been observed for these fungi. [...]

Phytopathogenic Fungi: what have we learned from genome sequences?

ResearchBlogging.orgA review in Plant Cell from Darren Soanes and colleagues summarizes some of the major findings about evolution of phytopathogenic fungi gleaned from genome sequencing highlighting 12 fungi and 2 oomycetes. By mapping evolution of genes identified as virulence factors as well as genes that appear to have similar patterns of diversification, we can hope to derive some principals about how phytopathogenic fungi have evolved from saprophyte [...]