The Hyphal Tip

Report concludes that a fungal genome database is of "the highest priority".

This is the title as listed in PubMed for this article from Future Medicine about the AAM report on charting future needs and avenues of research on the fungal kingdom.

Just finished attending Genetics and Cell Biology of Basidiomycetes in Cape Girardeau, MO which was an intimate gathering of basidiomycetaphiles.  I learned about systems that are used for studying fruiting body development, genetic mapping, pheromone and mating genes, kinesin dynamics, meoitic gene regulation, and a host of topics.  I'm happy I got a chance to meet more folks in the community and learned about where informatics is needed

The [[Trichoderma reesei]] genome paper was recently published in Nature Biotechnology from Diego Martinez at [[LANL]] with collaborators at [[JGI]], [[LBNL]], and others. This fungus was chosen for sequencing because it was found on canvas tents eating the cotton material suggesting it may be a good candidate for degrading cellulose plant material as part of cellulosic ethanol production.

The genome of Podospora anserina S mat+ strain was sequenced by Genoscope and CNRS and published recently in Genome Biology. The genome sequence data has been available for several years, but it is great to see a publication describing the findings.  The 10X genome assembly with ~10,000 genes provides an important dataset for comparisons

Another asexual species of fungi also has evidence for the meiosis-specific process of Repeat Induced Point-mutations (RIP).

Dettman, Anderson, and Kohn recently published a paper in BMC Evolutionary Biology on reproductive experimental evolution in two Neurospora crassa populations evolved under different selective conditions. This is a great study that complements work published last year in Nature on experimental evolution in Saccharomyces cerevisiae populations. Neurospora populations were evolved under high salt and low temperature and were started from either high diversity (interspecific crosses, N. crassa vs N. intermedia) or low diversity (intraspecific cross, two N. crassa isolates D143 (Louisiana, USA)and D69 (Ivory Coast)) as described in Figure 1. The experimentally evolved populations were then tested for asexual and sexual fitness (they were taken through complete meiotic cycle throughout the experiment to avoid insure there was selection on the sexual reproduction pathway.

I'm including a recapping as many of the talks as I remember. There were 6 concurrent sessions each afternoon so you have to miss a lot of talks. The conference was bursting at the seams as it was- at least 140 people had to be turned away beyond the 750 who attended.

If there was any theme in the conference it was "Hey we are all using these genome sequences".

A recent paper describes the discovery of 9 new introns in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by Ron Davis's group at Stanford, using high density tiling arrays from Affymetrix. The arrays are designed for both strands allow the detection of transcripts transcribed from both strands. The arrays were also put to work by the Davis and Steinmetz labs to create a high density map of transcription in yeast and for polymorphism mapping from the Kruglyak lab.

Whole genome tiling arrays have also been employed in other fungi. For example, Anita Sil’s group at UCSF constructed a random tiling array for Histoplasma capsulatum and used it to identify genes responding to reactive nitrogen species. A similar approach was used in Cryptococcus neoformans to investigate temperature regulated genes using random sequencing clones.

As the technology has become cheaper, it may become sensible to use a tiling array to detect transcripts rather than ESTs when attempting to annotate a genome. In the Histoplasma work transcriptional units could be identified from hybridization alone. Some of the algorithms will need some work to correct incorporate this information, and the sensitivity and density of the array will influence this. These techniques can be part of a resequencing approaches or fast genotyping progeny from QTL experiments when the sequence from both parents is known (or at least enough of the polymorphims for the genetic map).

What is superior about the current Affymetrix yeast tiling array is the inclusion of both strands. This allows detection of transcripts from both strands. Several anti-sense transcripts in yeast have been discovered recently including in the IME4 locus through more classical approaches, but perhaps many more await discovery with high resolution transcriptional data from whole genome tiling arrays.