By Jason Stajich, on March 12th, 2009
An avid reader pointed out that I was not entirely thorough in describing that we don’t enough about the V8 agar media that is used to induce mating in Cryptococcus. In fact a great deal of work on mating in this fungus had focused on identifying what pathways are induced by V8 agar that [...]
By Jason Stajich, on January 13th, 2008
On the cover of this week’s Nature is a picture of Phycomyces blakesleeanus 
highlighting the discovery of the MAT locus in this Zygomycete fungus from Alex Idnurm and Joe Heitman and colleagues. While it was previously known that Zygomycetes (the Orange lineage represented by R. oryzae in the tree below) mate, the specific locus has until now, never been discovered. The authors in this study identified the MAT locus through a sequence search looking for HMG-box genes knowing that these are found the Mating Type locus in Basidiomycetes and Ascomycetes. They confirmed the identity through a through set of experiments that included PCR, sequencing and crosses of (+) and (-) strains of P. blakesleeanus, and Southern [...]
By sharpton, on October 5th, 2007
Few organisms are as well understood at the genetic level as Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Given that there are more yeast geneticists than yeast genes and exemplary resources for the community (largely a result of their size), this comes as no surprise. [...]
By Jason Stajich, on September 18th, 2007
A recent paper “Targeted gene deletion in Candida parapsilosis demonstrates the role of secreted lipase in virulence”, from the Nosanchuk lab at Yeshiva University, shows the role of secreted lipases in virulence of this pathogen. [...]
By sharpton, on April 3rd, 2007
I’ve never worked with Magnaporthe grisea, the fungus responsible for rice blast, one of the most devastating crop diseases, but I do know that its life cycle is complicated and that knocking out roughly 61% of the genes in the genome and evaluating the mutant phenotype to infer gene function is not trivial. In their recent letter to Nature, Jeon et al did what [...]
By sharpton, on January 30th, 2007
In a recent Microbiology Mini-Review, Meriel Jones catalogs both the potential benefits and problems that arise from fungal genome sequencing. [...]
