A Phenome-Based Functional Analysis of Transcription Factors in the Cereal Head Blight Fungus, Fusarium graminearum

PLoS Pathogens

Jin-Cheol Kim¹  Gyung Ja Choi¹  Peijian Cao²  Seung-Ho Lee³  Sae-Yeon Hong³  Yang-Do Choi³  Yang Lin³  Young-Su Seo³  Yong-Hwan Lee³  Seunghoon Lee³  Minkyun Kim³  Yongsoo Kim³  Aram Cho³  Hokyoung Son³  Yin-Won Lee³  Kyunghun Min³  Myung-Gu Kim³  Eun-Kyung Kim³  Ae Ran Park³  Jae Yun Lim³  Jian-Ming Jin³  Jung-Eun Kim³  Jungkwan Lee⁴  Sung-Hwan Yun⁵ 

[1] Chemical Biotechnology Center, Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Daejon, Korea;China Tobacco Gene Research Center, Zhengzhou Tobacco Research Institute, Zhengzhou, Henan, China;Department of Agricultural Biotechnology and Centers for Fungal Pathogenesis and Agricultural Biomaterials, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea;Department of Applied Biology, Dong-A University, Busan, Korea;Department of Medical Biotechnology, Soonchunhyang University, Asan, Korea

关键词: Phenotypes;    Fusarium graminearum;    Fungal genetics;    Fungal genomics;    Sexual differentiation;    Fungi;    Transcription factors;    Plant fungal pathogens;   

DOI  :  10.1371/journal.ppat.1002310

学科分类：生物科学（综合）

来源: Public Library of Science

【 摘 要 】

Fusarium graminearum is an important plant pathogen that causes head blight of major cereal crops. The fungus produces mycotoxins that are harmful to animal and human. In this study, a systematic analysis of 17 phenotypes of the mutants in 657 Fusarium graminearum genes encoding putative transcription factors (TFs) resulted in a database of over 11,000 phenotypes (phenome). This database provides comprehensive insights into how this cereal pathogen of global significance regulates traits important for growth, development, stress response, pathogenesis, and toxin production and how transcriptional regulations of these traits are interconnected. In-depth analysis of TFs involved in sexual development revealed that mutations causing defects in perithecia development frequently affect multiple other phenotypes, and the TFs associated with sexual development tend to be highly conserved in the fungal kingdom. Besides providing many new insights into understanding the function of F. graminearum TFs, this mutant library and phenome will be a valuable resource for characterizing the gene expression network in this fungus and serve as a reference for studying how different fungi have evolved to control various cellular processes at the transcriptional level.

【 授权许可】

CC BY