Evidence for acquisition of virulence effectors in pathogenic chytrids

BMC Evolutionary Biology

Research Article

Tiffany Kosch¹  Jinling Huang¹  Guiling Sun¹  Zefeng Yang¹  Kyle Summers¹ 

[1] Department of Biology, East Carolina University, 27858, Greenville, NC, USA;

关键词: Serine Peptidase;    Horizontal Gene Transfer;    Horizontal Gene Transfer Event;    Amphibian Population;    Cyanidioschyzon Merolae;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2148-11-195

 received in 2011-05-13, accepted in 2011-07-08,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe decline in amphibian populations across the world is frequently linked to the infection of the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). This is particularly perplexing because Bd was only recently discovered in 1999 and no chytrid fungus had previously been identified as a vertebrate pathogen.ResultsIn this study, we show that two large families of known virulence effector genes, crinkler (CRN) proteins and serine peptidases, were acquired by Bd from oomycete pathogens and bacteria, respectively. These two families have been duplicated after their acquisition by Bd. Additional selection analyses indicate that both families evolved under strong positive selection, suggesting that they are involved in the adaptation of Bd to its hosts.ConclusionsWe propose that the acquisition of virulence effectors, in combination with habitat disruption and climate change, may have driven the Bd epidemics and the decline in amphibian populations. This finding provides a starting point for biochemical investigations of chytridiomycosis.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Sun et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.