Program Book - 27th Fungal Genetics Conference

FULL POSTER SESSION ABSTRACTScharacterized gene products using these new terms to uncharacterized orthologs in other Candida species. Through genome annotation and analysis, weidentified candidate pathogenicity genes in seven non-albicans Candida species and in one additional C. albicans strain, WO-1. We also defined a set of theC. albicans genes at the intersection of biofilm formation, filamentous growth, pathogenesis and phenotypic switching and now, finger and tentacledevelopment, of this opportunistic fungal pathogen, which provide a compelling list of candidates for further experimentation.225. Genome sequencing of Verticillium albo-atrum pathotypes in order to understand wilt disease in hop production. J. Jakse 1 , G. Rot 2 , V. Jelen 1 , S.Radisek 3 , S. Mandelc 1 , A. Majer 1 , B. Zupan 2 , B. Javornik 1 . 1) Agronomy Department, Biotechnical faculty, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia; 2)Bioinformatics Laboratory, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia; 3) Slovenian Institute of Hop Researchand Brewing, Zalec, Slovenia.Verticillium wilt of hop is a vascular disease caused by V. albo-atrum, outbreaks of the lethal strains of which threaten current hop production in Europe.Fungal isolates differ in aggressiveness and have been classified by pathogenicity tests into mild and lethal pathotypes. In general, the mild strain infectionvaries in intensity from year to year and rarely causes the death of the whole plant, whereas lethal strain infection causes very severe symptoms, withrapid plant withering and dieback. Lethal strains with increased virulence in hop were first reported in the UK in 1933, followed by outbreaks in Slovenia in1997 and in Germany in 2005. Sequencing the genomes of mild and lethal V. albo-atrum hop isolates aimed at the dissection of the pathotype genomes, inorder to provide an insight into their genomic structure, which might explain the increased virulence of the lethal strain, enable the detection of virulenceassociatedfactors and elucidate the pathogenicity in Verticillium spp. Genomes of three mild and three lethal strains from three different geographicregions were sequenced by Illumina technology. The reference lethal strain, with a larger genome than the mild strains, as confirmed by flow cytometry,was sequenced using three different length libraries producing a total of 76.3 M reads. From 4.8 to 11.5 M reads were obtained for the other five strains.Additionally, 38.3 M RNA-seq reads of mild and lethal strain transcriptomes were produced for annotation of the transcribed regions. Bioinformaticsanalyses included de-novo assembly of the reference genome, followed by mapping of the other genomes for comparison of mild and lethal strains todetermine specific regions of the strains. The reference genome was assembled into 715 contigs, with a total length of 33.59 Mb. Comparison of lethalversus mild strains revealed that 0.5 Mb of DNA was only present in the lethal strains. Gene prediction tools supported by RNA-seq analysis revealed 9858gene models, 91 of which were present in the lethal unique region. Analysis of repetitive DNA based on prebuilt models masked 1.53% of the assembledgenome, while de-novo identification of repeats masked 5.86% of the genome. The presented sequencing study established a new genomic resource fornon-alfalfa V. albo-atrum strains and will enable their virulence to be studied.226. Aegerolysin proteins from Aspergillus species. Nada Krasevec 1 , Kristina Sepcic 2 , Sasa Rezonja 1,2 , Nina Sluga 1,2 , Peter Macek 2 , Gregor Anderluh 1 . 1) L11Laboratory for Molecular Biology and Nanobiotechnology, National Institute of Chemistry, Ljubljana, Slovenia; 2) Department of Biology, BiotechnicalFaculty, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.Currently, Aegerolysin family (Pfam06355) comprises over 300 proteins, mostly assigned as putative hemolysins, however, their function and biologicalrole is unknown. Some of them, i.e. aegerolysin, ostreolysin, pleurotolysin A, erylysin A from the Basidiomycota mushrooms (Agrocybe aegerita, Pleurotusostreatus and P. eryngei), and their orthologues, Asp-hemolysin from the human pathogens Aspergillus fumigatus (Eurotiales, Ascomycota) and PA0122(rahU) from Pseudomonas aeruginosa (Proteobacteria), have been characterized as lipid- or membrane-binding proteins. Aegerlysins are specificallydistributed among certain fungal species belonging to both Ascomycota and Basidiomycota taxa, however, they could be also found in bacteria and plants.In 2004, it was reported that in addition to the aegerolysin component A (pleurotolysin A, PlyA), a 59 kDa component B (pleurotolysin B, PlyB) is obligatoryfor the observed hemolytic activity of these proteins. In contrast to aegerolysins (component A), that appear widely distributed among differentorganisms, initial bioinformatical search of component B homologues results in a much lower number of similar putative proteins, even more, bothcomponents combined could be found in a few of fungal species only. Joint Genome Institute (JGI) has recently sequenced eight Aspergillus species (A.tubingensis, A. brasiliensis, A. acidus, A. glaucus, A. versicolor, A. sydowii, A. wentii and A. zonatus) as a result of community sequencing proposal(CSP2011). The genome sequences are available at MycoCosm (JGI) (http://genome.jgi.doe.gov/programs/fungi/index.jsf) and at the Aspergillus GenomeDatabase (AspGD) (http://www.aspgd.org/). The task of EUFGEN (EURotiales Functional GENomics consortium, http://www.eufgen.org/) is to complementthese genome sequences to those already available for the Aspergillus species. The strains were provided by CBS-KNAW fungal biodiversity center(http://www.cbs.knaw.nl/collection/AboutCollections.aspx). Our aim is to clarify experimentally the relation between the genome context for the twocomponents and their presumed hemolytic activity.227. Assembly, Annotation, and Analysis of Multiple Mycorrhizal Fungal Genomes. Alan Kuo 1 , Igor Grigoriev 1 , Annegret Kohler 2 , Francis Martin 2 ,Mycorrhizal Genomics Initiative (MGI) Consortium. 1) Fungal Genomics Program, DOE Joint Genome Institute, 2800 Mitchell Dr., Walnut Creek, CA, 94598USA; 2) Lab of Excellence ARBRE, Department of Tree-Microbe Interactions, INRA-Nancy, 54280 Champenoux, France.Mycorrhizal fungi play critical roles in host plant health, soil community structure and chemistry, and carbon and nutrient cycling, all areas of intenseinterest to the US Dept. of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI). To this end we are building on our earlier sequencing of the Laccaria bicolor genomeby partnering with INRA-Nancy and the mycorrhizal research community in the MGI to sequence and analyze dozens of mycorrhizal genomes of allBasidiomycota and Ascomycota orders and multiple ecological types (ericoid, orchid, and ectomycorrhizal). JGI has developed and deployed highthroughputsequencing techniques, and Assembly, RNASeq, and Annotation Pipelines. In 2012 alone we sequenced, assembled, and annotated 12 draft orimproved genomes of mycorrhizae, and predicted ~232831 genes and ~15011 multigene families, All of this data is publicly available on JGI MycoCosm(http://jgi.doe.gov/fungi/), which provides access to both the genome data and tools with which to analyze the data. Preliminary comparisons of thecurrent total of 14 public mycorrhizal genomes suggest that 1) short secreted proteins potentially involved in symbiosis are more enriched in some ordersthan in others amongst the mycorrhizal Agaricomycetes, 2) there are wide ranges of numbers of genes involved in certain functional categories, such assignal transduction and post-translational modification, and 3) novel gene families are specific to some ecological types.228. Comparative reannotation of 21 Aspergillus genomes. Asaf A. Salamov, Robert Riley, Igor Grigoriev. DOE Joint Genome Inst, Walnut Creek, CA.We used comparative gene modeling to reannotate 21 Aspergillus genomes from MycoCosm and AspGD.Initial automatic annotation of individualgenomes may contain some errors of different nature, for example, missing genes, incorrect exon-intron structures, 'chimeras', which fuse 2 or moregenes,or splitting genes into 2 or more models.The main premise behind the comparative modeling approach is that for closely related genomes mostorthologous families have the same conserved gene structure. The algorithm maps all gene models predicted in all individual Aspergillus genomes to eachgenomes and for each locus selects among the potentially many competing models the one, which most closely resembles the orthologous genes fromother genomes. This procedure is iterated until no change in gene models will be observed. For the 21 Aspergillus genomes we predicted a total of 4503new gene models ( ~2% per genome), supported by comparative analysis, additionally correcting ~18% of oldgene models. This resulted in total of 4065176