The Hyphal Tip: Fungal Genomes and Comparative Genomics

Mike Challen has summarized discussion at two recent conferences regarding a Basidiomycete Research Network at his blog in a post on BRN - Summary of Discussions, 14/07/08. In particular it is important to establish a community network that will help basidiomycete labs. There is also a strong need for shared approaches for effective use the genomic data from the more than a dozen basidiomycete genomes currently being sequenced.

The American Academy of Microbiology has released a report (PDF) on the Fungal Kingdom outlining importance of research in the kingdom and recommending several areas of priority for future areas of research.

Looks like the USDA, Mars (the candy company), and IBM are partnering up to sequence the Cacao plants genome for everyone to use. Here is the article over at BBC News.

A year ago researchers at James Madison University discovered that, Pedobacter cryoconitis, a bacteria first found on the skin of red backed salamanders, was found to prevent the growth of the chytrid B. dendrobatidis, which is currently decimating frog populations.

The old site I setup during my PhD (fungal.genome.duke.edu) was shutdown by Duke. I have been able to migrate the domain name to the fungalgenome.org site that is funded by the TaylorLab, but have not had time to restore all functionality of the old data and site.

Tom Bruns, Martin Bidartondo and 250 others sent a letter to Science describing the current problems with fixing annotation in GenBank. There is an entertaining accompanying news article that interviews several people about the problem of updating annotation and species assigned to sequences in the database. In particular the problem for mycologists that many fungi found from metagenomic approaches are only identified through molecular sequences and having the wrong species associated with a sequence can be difficult when studying community ecology composition.  This problem is not limited to fungi by any means, but recent reports find as many as 20% of fungal Intergenic Spacer (ITS) sequences are mis-attributed to the wrong species. 

There's a nice quote in the news article from Steven Salzberg talking about the difficulties in getting sequences, especially from big centers, updated. I'm sure he is thinking of many examples, like reclassifying some Drosophila sequence traces.

Hyphoid logic points out that it is appropriate to discuss about the oomycete Phytophthora infestans on St. Patrick's Day and mentions a NYT article "The fungus that conquered Europe" that is worth a look.

It is also worth thinking about another blight, well rust, that is spreading through the middle east and could threaten wheat crops worldwide. New Scientist has excellent coverage of Puccinia

The following is an announcement to the B.dendrobatidis and fungal community at large from Alan Kuo at JGI. This is the JAM81 strain (Jess Morgan collected from a frog in the California Sierra Nevada). The JEL423 (Joyce Longcore, collected in Panama) strain genome sequence and annotation is available from the Broad Institute.

Today, I would like to share the news about the publication of the Laccaria bicolor genome. This is the first mycorrhizal symbiotic genome published in the Nature journal. The title is "The genome of Laccaria bicolor provides insights into mycorrhizal symbiosis". The team consisteing of more than 60 researchers from 16 institutions have revealed the interaction between plant and fungi. For complete publication and additional

I've been too busy to post much these last few days, but here are a few links to some papers I found interesting in my recent browsing.

• FOLy: an integrated database for the classification and functional annotation of fungal oxidoreductases potentially involved in the degradation of lignin and related aromatic compounds - so a database of these enzymes