The Hyphal Tip: Fungal Genomes and Comparative Genomics

Back from ISMB/ECCB and a mountain of things left undone that somehow still need doing ... including a quick entry about what was interesting at the conference.

When first discovered, the gene LaeA was thought to be a master switch for silencing of several NRPS secondary metabolite gene clusters in Aspergillus. NRPS and PKS are important genes in filamentous fungi as they produce many compounds that likely help fungi compete in the ecological niche mycotoxins (e.g. aflatoxin, gliotoxin)...

Your eye contains the same genetic content as your fingernail, but these two tissues look nothing alike. One significant cause of this difference is the tissue specific regulation of the genes in the genome. In some tissues in your body, a gene may be expressed (transcribed) while that same gene may be silent in another tissue type.

Splicing of pre-messenger RNA is necessary to remove introns and create well formed and translateable mRNA, but the purpose of introns still remains a mystery. One idea is they provide a role in the error checking machinery, or Nonsense Mediated Decay (NMD), by providing way-points during translation. A protein is deposited at the exon junction complex (EJC) which indicates a splicing event has occurred. During translation, if the ribosome encounters a premature stop (or termination) codon (PTC) and then sees one of these EJC way-points, it signals the corrupted message for degradation. Several predictions come out of these models including the lack of introns in the 3' UTR and that the average length of exons should be correlated with the window that the proofreading mechanism can operate on. These are discussed in several papers out of Mike Lynch's lab including (Lynch and Connery 2003), (Lynch and Kewalramani, 2003), (Lynch and Richardson, 2002) and recently (Scofield et al, 2007). Efforts to understand the splicing machinery, particularly in S. cerevisiae have led to the discovery of numerous genes that code for proteins that make up the spliceosome. Some of these include small RNAs as well as protein coding genes. The SR proteins are serine-arginine rich proteins that regulate splicing and are found in almost all eukaryotes including most fungi (even those with few introns, such as S. cerevisiae). SR proteins play a role in splicing and in nuclear export (Masuyama et al, 2004, Sanford et al, 2004) indicating that a coupling of these processes may explain why genes with introns tend to be more highly expressed. The evolution of the spliceosomal family of genes is also interesting because the families appear to diversify in some eukaryotes perhaps where there are more elaborate splicing and regulatory action (Barbosa-Morais et al, 2006). There is some debate as to whether splicing occurs after the pre-mRNA is completely synthesized or if it happens as transcription is occurring. Work on this has shown that both spliceosomal assembly can co-occur with polymerase during transcription, as well as evidence that most splicing (in yeast) is post-transcriptional (Tardiff et al, 2006). It is argued that the two steps occur together to maximize efficiency and fidelity (Das et el, 2006, Moore et al, 2006), but perhaps affinities are species-specific and have evolved to correlate with intron densities?