Examining the evolution of the regulatory circuit controlling secondary metabolism and development in the fungal genus Aspergillus

PLoS Genetics
Abigail L LindAntonis Rokas

Abstract

Filamentous fungi produce diverse secondary metabolites (SMs) essential to their ecology and adaptation. Although each SM is typically produced by only a handful of species, global SM production is governed by widely conserved transcriptional regulators in conjunction with other cellular processes, such as development. We examined the interplay between the taxonomic narrowness of SM distribution and the broad conservation of global regulation of SM and development in Aspergillus, a diverse fungal genus whose members produce well-known SMs such as penicillin and gliotoxin. Evolutionary analysis of the 2,124 genes comprising the 262 SM pathways in four Aspergillus species showed that most SM pathways were species-specific, that the number of SM gene orthologs was significantly lower than that of orthologs in primary metabolism, and that the few conserved SM orthologs typically belonged to non-homologous SM pathways. RNA sequencing of two master transcriptional regulators of SM and development, veA and mtfA, showed that the effects of deletion of each gene, especially veA, on SM pathway regulation were similar in A. fumigatus and A. nidulans, even though the underlying genes and pathways regulated in each species differed. In cont...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jan 19, 2016·Frontiers in Microbiology·Jens C Frisvad, Thomas O Larsen
Jun 29, 2017·PloS One·Ming-Yueh WuJae-Hyuk Yu
Oct 4, 2016·G3 : Genes - Genomes - Genetics·Abigail L LindAntonis Rokas
Dec 6, 2017·Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology·Slavica Janevska, Bettina Tudzynski
Jul 12, 2017·Frontiers in Microbiology·Eva-Maria NiehausBettina Tudzynski
Sep 6, 2018·Annual Review of Genetics·Hans-Wilhelm NützmannAnne Osbourn

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
PCR
RNA-seq

Software Mentioned

HTSeq
Tophat2
R
count
ggplot2
BLAST
AmiGO
Asp
DESeq2
Cytoscape

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