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.

[Read more →]

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.

[Read more →]

PZ Meyers has a post summarizing of an older paper from Elliot Meyerowitz (2002) that comapares plant and animal development. In particular there is are some major themes summarized about how plants and animals form patterns and cell to cell signaling as part of development. What’s missing is what we’ve learned about within group comparisons where there are multiple lineages of single-celled and multicelled

[Read more →]

A review in Plant Cell from Darren Soanes and colleagues summarizes some of the major findings about evolution of phytopathogenic fungi gleaned from genome sequencing highlighting 12 fungi and 2 oomycetes. By mapping evolution of genes identified as virulence factors as well as genes that appear to have similar patterns of diversification, we can hope to derive some principals about how phytopathogenic fungi have evolved from saprophyte ancestors.

[Read more →]

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.

[Read more →]

The Willi Hennig Society, homebase for all good cladists, has subsidized the license fee for TNT so that it is now a freely available program (although it is not open-source). TNT implements phylogenetic analysis under parsimony with a fast tree searching algorithm. I believe TNT was one of the software

[Read more →]

Dave Hibbett wrote a great article for Mycological Research that describes the current state of systematics and evolutionary studies of morphology in mushroom-forming Agaricomycete fungi. His article, dedicated to the late, great mycologist Orson K Miller, Jr and entitled “After the gold rush, or before the flood? Evolutionary morphology of mushroom-forming fungi (Agaricomycetes) in the early 21st century” describes the how classification and systematics has changed in the last two hundred years and macromorphology to the more than “108,000 nucleotide sequences of ‘homobasidiomycetes’, filed under 7300 unique names.”

The article contains some beautiful pictures many of which are taken from some of the eminent mycological photographers and mycologists Michael Wood and Taylor Lockwood.

[Read more →]

While many strains of S. cerevisiae are being sequenced, a single strain, YJM789, isolated from the lung of an AIDS patient was sequenced a few years ago at Stanford and published this summer. The genome was described in a paper entitled “Genome sequencing and comparative analysis of Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain YJM789″.

[Read more →]

Fungi, like most organisms, take an active role in finding food for survival. When thinking about hostile takeovers by fungi, one probably thinks about mycelia growing towards nutrients, rotting plant matter, the ability to extract nutrients from a living host, or perhaps producing toxins or secondary metabolites that can affect the host. However, [...]

[Read more →]

Michigan State researchers Heather Hallen and Jonathan Walton have reportedly cloned genes from Amanita for alpha-amanitin (mispelled as alpha-aminitin in NYTimes article) which inhibits RNA polymerase II and phallacidin which inhibits actin filament polymerization. The gene sequences are in GenBank for those itching to look at evolutionary relationships of these genes in other fungi.
This [...]

[Read more →]