The Hyphal Tip: Fungal Genomes and Comparative Genomics

Frogs have been having a tough time of it lately. While there are likely many contributing factors to the global frog decline, one known cause of frog dieoff is a fungal pathogen: Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. Unfortunately, little is known about how this aquatic fungus kills frogs or how the disease was originated and spread. However, Dr. Jess Morgan and colleagues published in PNAS (open access article)

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

• The Dothideomycete leaf streak disease causing fungus Mycosphaerella fijiensis
• Soybean rust Phakopsora pachyrhizi
• The Basidiomycete and jelly fungus Tremella mesenterica proposed by Joe Heitman for use as outgroup to the human pathogen Cryptococcus
• The plant pathogen Cochliobolus heterostrophus proposed by Gillian Turgeon which ironically was already sequenced

Lots of papers in Mycologia (subscription required) this month of different groups analyzing the fine-scale relationships of many different fungal clades using the loads of sequences that were generated as part of the Fungal Tree of Life project.

The public release of the Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis automated annotation from the Broad/FGI has been made available. "This project is part of the Fungal Genome Initiative at the Broad Institute and was funded by NHGRI. This release contains a set of 8,794 predicted genes, BLAST databases, precomputed BlastX and HMMer analyses, alternative gene predictions, tRNA predictions, and RFAM features. The annotation can be accessed through the project website: http://www.broad.mit.edu/annotation/genome/batrachochytrium_dendrobatidis