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Fungi behaving badly

Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 3, pages 832–833 (2005)Cite this article

Unlike bacterial pathogens, our current understanding of the genomic adaptations in pathogenic fungi is rather poor. However, this situation is changing rapidly with the availability of the genomes of a few pathogenic fungi.

In contrast to the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome, C. neoformans shows no evidence of genome duplications2. Almost all (99.7%) of the shared genes have greater than 98% identity at the nucleotide level. Strain-specific genes include a putative Ras GTPase-activating protein and a region of ∼60-kb segmental duplication in strain JEC21 that contains 22 duplicated genes.

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Figure 1: The characteristic basidiospore mating structure of Cryptococcus neoformans.
Figure 2: GFP-labelled rice-blast fungus spreading through a rice plant.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pathogen Sequencing Unit, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, CB10 1SA, Cambridge, UK

    Arnab Pain

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  1. Arnab Pain
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DATABASES

Entrez

Aspergillus nidulans

C. neoformans strain B-3501A

C. neoformans strain JEC21

M. grisea strain 70-15

Neurospora crassa

Phanerochaete chrysosporium

Saccharomyces cerevisiae

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Pain, A. Fungi behaving badly. Nat Rev Microbiol 3, 832–833 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro1270

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