Recent Tweets

Powered by Twitter Tools

RSSLoading Feed...

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. [...]

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). [...]

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. [...]

Neurospora speciation through experimental evolution

ResearchBlogging.orgDettman, Anderson, and Kohn recently published a paper in BMC Evolutionary Biology on reproductive experimental evolution in two Neurospora crassa populations evolved under different selective conditions. This is a great study that complements work published last year in Nature on experimental evolution in Saccharomyces cerevisiae populations. Neurospora populations were evolved under high salt and low temperature and were started from either high diversity (interspecific crosses, N. crassa vs N. intermedia) or low diversity (intraspecific cross, two N. crassa isolates D143 (Louisiana, USA)and D69 (Ivory Coast)) as described in Figure 1. The experimentally evolved populations were then tested for asexual and sexual fitness (they were taken through complete meiotic cycle throughout the experiment to avoid insure there was selection on the sexual reproduction pathway.

Neurospora alternative splicing

mitochondriaA quick link to a Neurospora paper in Genetics today entitled “Alternative Splicing Gives Rise to Different Isoforms of the Neurospora crassa Tob55 Protein That Vary in Their Ability to Insert Beta-Barrel Proteins Into the Outer Mitochondrial Membrane”. The authors investigated alternative splicing of a gene found in the TOB complex on the outside of the mitochondria. [...]

Genomes on the horizon at JGI

Several more fungi are on the docket for sequencing at JGI through their community sequencing program. This includes