• “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 and human interactions
• Attempts to save amphibians from chytridiomycosis “Riders of a Modern-Day Ark” (PLoS Biology)
• Looks like Scott Baker with the JGI are in the process of resequencing several classical mutant strains of Phycomyces, Neurospora and Cochliobolus, Cryphonectria for sequence-based mapping of mutants (i.e. here and here and here).

There are several other rotting fungi that are nearly done at JGI (but the task of writing and coordinating the analyses for the papers are ongoing!) include Schizophyllum commune and Pleurotus ostreatus. There are also several more mycorrhizal and plant pathogenic basidiomycete fungi as well as some classic model systems that have finished genomes and are in the process of finalizing papers.  It is an exciting time that is just beginning as these genome and transcriptional data are integrated and compared for their different ecological, morphological, and metabolic capabilities.

The article is unfortunately not Open Access so I haven’t even read it from home yet, but pass along this news to you, dear reader. Will get a chance to read through more than the abstract to see what glistening gems have been extracted from this genomic endeavor.
D. Martinez, J. Challacombe, I. Morgenstern, D. Hibbett, M. Schmoll, C. P. Kubicek, P. Ferreira, F. J. Ruiz-Duenas, A. T. Martinez, P. Kersten, K. E. Hammel, A. V. Wymelenberg, J. Gaskell, E. Lindquist, G. Sabat, S. S. BonDurant, L. F. Larrondo, P. Canessa, R. Vicuna, J. Yadav, H. Doddapaneni, V. Subramanian, A. G. Pisabarro, J. L. Lavin, J. A. Oguiza, E. Master, B. Henrissat, P. M. Coutinho, P. Harris, J. K. Magnuson, S. E. Baker, K. Bruno, W. Kenealy, P. J. Hoegger, U. Kues, P. Ramaiya, S. Lucas, A. Salamov, H. Shapiro, H. Tu, C. L. Chee, M. Misra, G. Xie, S. Teter, D. Yaver, T. James, M. Mokrejs, M. Pospisek, I. V. Grigoriev, T. Brettin, D. Rokhsar, R. Berka, D. Cullen (2009). Genome, transcriptome, and secretome analysis of wood decay fungus Postia placenta supports unique mechanisms of lignocellulose conversion Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809575106

This updated annotation is able to join and split several sets of genes and the gene count sits at just under 14k genes in this 36Mb genome. There are a couple of hiccups in the GTF and Genome contig/supercontig file naming that I am told will be fixed by early next week.  Additional work to annotate the “Kinome” by the Broad team provides some promising new insight to this genome annotation as well.

We’re using this updated genome assembly address questions about evolution of genome structure by studying syntenic conservation and aspects of crossing over points during meiosis.  The C. cinereus system has long been used as model for fungal development and morphogensis of mushrooms as it is straightforward to induce mushroom fruiting in the laboratory.  It also a model for studying meiosis due to the synchronized meiosis occurring in the cells in the cap of the mushroom.

Happy genome shrooming.

A new and improved annotation of Cryptococcus neoformans var grubii strain H99 (serotype A) has been made available in GenBank and the Broad Institute website. This update is collaboration between several groups providing data and analyses and the genome annotation team at the Broad Institute.

Some changes noted by the Broad Institute include:

“This release of gene predictions for the serotype A isolate Cryptococcus neoformans var. grubii H99 is based on a new genomic assembly provided by Dr. Fred Dietrich at the Duke Center for Genome Technology. The new assembly consists of 14 nuclear chromosomes and a single 21 KB mitochondrial chromosome, and has resulted in a reduction of the estimated genome size from 19.5 to 18.9 Mb. Improvements in the assembly and in our annotation process have resulted in a set of 6,967 predicted protein products, 335 fewer than the previous release.”

This work provides an important stepping stone in understanding and eventually controlling this pathogen which is devastating cacao plantations. An associated review describes what we have and can learn about Witches’ broom disease.

See related:

• Will you always be able to satisfy that chocolate craving?
• Theobroma cacao to be sequenced, Oompa Loompa genome to follow.

Jorge MC Mondego, Marcelo F Carazzolle, Gustavo GL Costa, Eduardo F Formighieri, Lucas P Parizzi, Johana Rincones, Carolina Cotomacci, Dirce M Carraro, Anderson F Cunha, Helaine Carrer, Ramon O Vidal, Raissa C Estrela, Odalys Garcia, Daniela PT Thomazella, Bruno V de Oliveira, Acassia BL Pires, Maria Carolina S Rio, Marcos Renato R Araujo, Marcos H de Moraes, Luis AB Castro, Karina P Gramacho, Marilda S Goncalves, Jose P Moura Neto, Aristoteles Goes Neto, Luciana V Barbosa, Mark J Guiltinan, Bryan A Bailey, Lyndel W Meinhardt, Julio CM Cascardo, Goncalo AG Pereira (2008). A genome survey of Moniliophthora perniciosa gives new insights into Witches’ Broom Disease of cacao BMC Genomics, 9 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2164-9-548

The DNA sequence of Melampsora larici-populina has been determined by the U.S. Department of Energy DOE Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI). Annotations of the v1.0 assembly of Melampsora laricis-populina are publicly available at http://www.jgi.doe.gov/Melampsora.
Genome analyses have been carried out by an international consortium comprised of DOE JGI, France’s National Institute for Agricultural Research (F Martin et al., INRA-Nancy), Canadian Forest Service (R Hamelin et al., Laurentian Forestry Centre), and the Bioinformatics & Evolutionary Genomics Division (Rouzé et al., Gent University) in Belgium.

The poplar leaf rust fungus Melampsora is the most devastating and widespread pathogen of poplars, and has limited the use of poplars for environmental and wood production goals in many parts of the world. All known poplar cultivars are susceptible to Melampsora species, and new virulent strains are continuously developing. This disease therefore has a strong potential impact on current and future poplar plantations used for production of forest products (principally pulp and consolidated wood products), carbon sequestration, biofuels production, and bioremediation.

This isn’t the only lichen being sequenced. Xanthoria parietina is also in the queue at JGI, but has taken a while to get going because of some logistical problems getting the DNA (and any problems are amplified because it takes a long time to get new material since lichens grow very slow).

The transfer of the power for researchers to be able to quick exploratory whole-genome sequencing with next-gen and eventually, high quality genome sequences from next-gen sequencing is predicted to transform how this kind of science gets done. It means we’ll probably just sequence a mutant strain instead of trying to map the mutation – this is happening already in anecdotal stories in worms and in our work in mushrooms. N.B. this is done after a mutagenized strain has been cleaned up a bit to insure we’re looking for one or only a few mutations based on some crosses – but that is part of standard genetic approaches anyways.

This fast,cheap,whole-genome-sequencing is also the stuff of personal genomics, but for basic research it will also mean that a first pass exploring gene repertoire of an organism will be a multi-week instead of multi-year project. I just hope we’re training enough people who can efficiently extract the information from all this data with solid bioinformatics, computational, data-oriented programming, and statistical skills to support all the labs that will want to take this approach. You’ll need a life-vest to swim in the big data pool for a while until more tools are developed that can be deployed by non-experts.

  faLen < contigs.fa | stats

2 flowcells (~10M reads @36bp/read or about 10X coverage of 40Mb genome)

            N = 199562
          SUM = 25463251
          MIN = 49
 1ST-QUARTILE = 87
       MEDIAN = 107.0
 3RD-QUARTILE = 146
          MAX = 5371
         MEAN = 127.59568956
          N50 = 130

4 flow cells  (~20M reads @36bp/read; or about 20X coverage of a 40Mb genome)

            N = 102437
          SUM = 38352075
          MIN = 41
 1ST-QUARTILE = 77.0
       MEDIAN = 153
 3RD-QUARTILE = 467
          MAX = 7189
         MEAN = 374.396702363
          N50 = 837

So that’s N50 of 837bp – for those used to seeing N50 on the order or 1.5Mb this is not great.  But from4 FC worth of sequencing which was pretty cheap.  This is a reasonably repeat-limited genome so we should get pretty good recovery if the seq coverage is high enough. Using Maq we can both scaffold the reads and recover a sufficient number of high quality SNPs for the mapping part of the project.

To get a better assembly one would need much deeper coverage as Daniel and Ewan explain in their Velvet paper and shown in Figure 4 (sorry, not open-access for 6 mo). Full credit: This sequence was from unpaired sequence reads from Illumina/Solexa Genomic sequencing done at UCB/QB3 facility on libraries prepared by Charles Hall in the Glass lab.

The genome project will hopefully improve the diagnosis and treatment work that is needed.  Beyond the insatiable need for chocolate, the NPR story does talk about the impact on farmers, the economy, and the environment with the loss of these cacao plantations.

Some links:

• A Not-So-Sweet Lesson from Brazil’s Cocoa Farms
• Witches’ Broom and Frosty Pod waft deadly through the jungle night
• Link from Ohio State University Cacao disease research
• STATUS OF CACAO WITCHES’ BROOM: Biology, Epidemiology, and Management, Annual Review of Phytopathology

The most surprising findings from the paper include the fact that there are so few members of some of the enzyme families even though this fungus is able to generate enzymes with so much cellulase activity. The authors found that there is not a significantly larger number of glucoside hydrolases which is a collection of carbohydrate degrading enzymes great for making simple sugars out of complex ones. In fact, several plant pathogens compared (Fusarium graminearum and Magnaporthe grisea) and the sake fermenting Aspergillus oryzae all have more members of this family than does.  T. reesei has almost the least (36) copies of a cellulose binding domain (CBM) of any of the filamentous ascomycete fungi.  They used the CAZyme database (carbohydrate active enzymes) database which has done a fantastic job building up profiles of different enzymes involved in carhohydrate degradation binding, and modifications.

Whether T. reesei is really the best cellulose degrading fungus is definitely an open question.  That it works well in the industrial culture that it has been utilized in is important, but there may be other species of fungi with improved cellulase activity and who may in fact have many more copies of cellulases.  So it will be good to add other fungi to the mix with quantitative information about degradation to try and glean what are the most important combination of enzymes and activities.

One technical note.  The comparison of copy number differences employed in the paper is a simple enough Chi-Squared, work that I’ve done with Matt Hahn and others include a gene family size comparison approach that also taked into account phylogenetic distances and assumes a birth-death process of gene family size change.  It would be great to apply the copy number differences through this or other approaches that just evaluate gene trees for these domains to see where the differences are significant and if they can be polarized to a particular branch of the tree.

So will this genome sequence lead to cheaper, better biofuel production? Certainly it provides an important toolkit to start systematically testing individual cellulase enzymes. It’s hard to say how fast this will make an impact, but the work of JBEI and a host of other research groups and biotech companies are going to be able to systematically test out the utility of these individual enzymes.

There is also evolutionary work by other groups on the evolution of these Hypocreales fungi trying to better define when biotrophic and heterotrophic transitions occurred to sample fungi with different lifestyles that might have different cellulase enyzmes that may not have been observed. Defining the relationships of these fungi and when and how many times transitions to lifestyles occurred to choose the most diverse fungi may be an important part of discovering novel enzymes.

Also see

• Discovery Channel Blog
  
• JGI press release

Martinez, D., Berka, R.M., Henrissat, B., Saloheimo, M., Arvas, M., Baker, S.E., Chapman, J., Chertkov, O., Coutinho, P.M., Cullen, D., Danchin, E.G., Grigoriev, I.V., Harris, P., Jackson, M., Kubicek, C.P., Han, C.S., Ho, I., Larrondo, L.F., de Leon, A.L., Magnuson, J.K., Merino, S., Misra, M., Nelson, B., Putnam, N., Robbertse, B., Salamov, A.A., Schmoll, M., Terry, A., Thayer, N., Westerholm-Parvinen, A., Schoch, C.L., Yao, J., Barbote, R., Nelson, M.A., Detter, C., Bruce, D., Kuske, C.R., Xie, G., Richardson, P., Rokhsar, D.S., Lucas, S.M., Rubin, E.M., Dunn-Coleman, N., Ward, M., Brettin, T.S. (2008). Genome sequencing and analysis of the biomass-degrading fungus Trichoderma reesei (syn. Hypocrea jecorina). Nature Biotechnology DOI: 10.1038/nbt1403