Molecular Biology Commons^™

Transposable Elements In Phytopathogenic Verticillium Spp.: Insights Into Genome Evolution And Inter- And Intra-Specific Diversification, Stefan G. Amyotte, Xiaoping Tan, Kayla Pennerman, Maria Del Mar Jimenez-Gasco, Steven J. Klosterman, Li-Jun Ma, Katherine F. Dobinson, Paola Veronese

Li-Jun Ma

Background Verticillium dahliae (Vd) and Verticillium albo-atrum (Va) are cosmopolitan soil fungi causing very disruptive vascular diseases on a wide range of crop plants. To date, no sexual stage has been identified in either microorganism suggesting that somatic mutation is a major force in generating genetic diversity. Whole genome comparative analysis of the recently sequenced strains VdLs.17 and VaMs.102 revealed that non-random insertions of transposable elements (TEs) have contributed to the generation of four lineage-specific (LS) regions in VdLs.17. Results We present here a detailed analysis of Class I retrotransposons and Class II “cut-and-paste” DNA elements detected in the sequenced …

Comparative Genomics Yields Insights Into Niche Adaptation Of Plant Vascular Wilt Pathogens, Steven J. Klosterman, Krishna V. Subbarao, Seogchan Kang, Paola Veronese, Scott E. Gold, Bart P. H. J. Thomma, Zehua Chen, Bernard Henrissat, Yong-Hwan Lee, Jongsun Park, Dez J. Barbara, Maria D. Garcia-Pedrajas, Amy Anchieta, Ronnie De Jonge, Parthasarathy Santhanam, Karunakaran Maruthachalam, Zahi Atallah, Stefan G. Amyotte, Zahi Paz, Patrik Inderbitzin, Ryan J. Hayes, David I. Heiman, Sarah Young, Qiandong Zeng, Reinhard Engels, James Galagan, Christina A. Cuomo, Katherine F. Dobinson, Li-Jun Ma

Li-Jun Ma

The vascular wilt fungi Verticillium dahliae and V. albo-atrum infect over 200 plant species, causing billions of dollars in annual crop losses. The characteristic wilt symptoms are a result of colonization and proliferation of the pathogens in the xylem vessels, which undergo fluctuations in osmolarity. To gain insights into the mechanisms that confer the organisms' pathogenicity and enable them to proliferate in the unique ecological niche of the plant vascular system, we sequenced the genomes of V. dahliae and V. albo-atrum and compared them to each other, and to the genome of Fusarium oxysporum, another fungal wilt pathogen. Our analyses …

Systematic Discovery Of Regulatory Motifs In Fusarium Graminearum By Comparing Four Fusarium Genomes, Lokesh Kumar, Andrew Breakspear, Corby Kistler, Li-Jun Ma, Xiaohui Xie

Li-Jun Ma

Background

Fusarium graminearum (Fg), a major fungal pathogen of cultivated cereals, is responsible for billions of dollars in agriculture losses. There is a growing interest in understanding the transcriptional regulation of this organism, especially the regulation of genes underlying its pathogenicity. The generation of whole genome sequence assemblies for Fg and three closely related Fusarium species provides a unique opportunity for such a study.

Results

Applying comparative genomics approaches, we developed a computational pipeline to systematically discover evolutionarily conserved regulatory motifs in the promoter, downstream and the intronic regions of Fg genes, based on the multiple alignments of sequenced Fusarium …

Genomic Analysis Of The Basal Lineage Fungus Rhizopus Oryzae Reveals A Whole-Genome Duplication, Li-Jun Ma, Ashraf S. Ibrahim, Christopher Skory, Manfred G. Grabherr, Gertraud Burger, Margi Butler, Marek Elias, Alexander Idnurm, B. Franz Lang, Teruo Sone, Ayumi Abe, Sarah E. Calvo, Luis M. Corrochano, Reinhard Engels, Jianmin Fu, Wilhelm Hansberg, Jung-Mi Kim, Chinnappa D. Kodira, Michael J. Koehrsen, Bo Liu, Diego Miranda-Saavedra, Sinead O'Leary, Lucila Ortiz-Castellanos, Russell Poulter, Julio Rodriguez-Romero, José Ruiz-Herrera, Yao-Qing Shen, Qiandong Zeng, James Galagan, Bruce W. Birren, Christina A. Cuomo, Brian L. Wickes

Li-Jun Ma

Rhizopus oryzae is the primary cause of mucormycosis, an emerging, life-threatening infection characterized by rapid angioinvasive growth with an overall mortality rate that exceeds 50%. As a representative of the paraphyletic basal group of the fungal kingdom called “zygomycetes,” R. oryzae is also used as a model to study fungal evolution. Here we report the genome sequence of R. oryzae strain 99–880, isolated from a fatal case of mucormycosis. The highly repetitive 45.3 Mb genome assembly contains abundant transposable elements (TEs), comprising approximately 20% of the genome. We predicted 13,895 protein-coding genes not overlapping TEs, many of which are paralogous …