By Jason Stajich, on April 15th, 2010
A couple of papers should have captured your attention lately in the realm of fungal genomics.
One is the publication of the genome of the black truffle Tuber melanosporum. This appears as an advanced publication at Nature (OA by virtue of Nature’s agreement on genome papers) along with a NYT writeup and is a tasty exploration of [...]
By Jason Stajich, on December 8th, 2008
A manuscript at Nature AOP details the success of the Dyer lab and collaborators in encouraging [[Aspergillus fumigatus]] to complete the sexual cycle under observable (e.g. laboratory) conditions. The authors are the teleomorph (sexual or perfect) stage [[Neosartorya fumigata]] for a fungus that had been previously only had an observed anamorphic stage. A. fumigatus can reproduce asexually forming structures called [[conidiophores]] which produce asexual spores called [[conidiospores]] (or mitospores as they are produced via mitosis) define the anamorph or imperfect stage, but no sexual structures such as [[cleistothecia]] that produce the packaged sexual products as [[ascospores]]. See a presentation by David Geiser (archived at the Aspergillus website) for more detail on some of the morphological and phylogenetic characters that unify the group of Eurotiales fungi. [...]
By Jason Stajich, on April 5th, 2008
Another asexual species of fungi also has evidence for the meiosis-specific process of Repeat Induced Point-mutations (RIP). [...]
By Jason Stajich, on March 23rd, 2008
A paper in Current Genetics describes the discovery of Repeat Induced Polymorphism (RIP) in two Euriotiales fungi. RIP has been extensively studied in Neurospora crassa and has been identified in other Sordariomycete fungi Magnaporthe, Fusiarium. This is not the first Aspergillus species to have RIP described as it was demonstrated in the biotech workhorse Aspergillus oryzae. However, I think this study is the first to describe RIP in a putatively asexual fungus. The evidence for RIP is only found in transposon sequences in the Aspergillus and Penicillium. A really interesting aspect of this discovery is RIP is thought to only occur during sexual stage, but a sexual state has never been observed for these fungi. [...]
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 blots.
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