Fusarium graminearum - GCA_900044135.1 Assembly and Gene Annotation

About Fusarium graminearum

Gibberella zeae, also known by the name of its anamorph Fusarium graminearum, is a fungal plant pathogen which causes fusarium head blight (FHB), a devastating disease on wheat and barley. The pathogen is responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year. Infection causes shifts in the amino acid composition of wheat, resulting in shriveled kernels and contaminating the remaining grain with mycotoxins, mainly deoxynivalenol (DON), which inhibits protein biosynthesis; and zearalenone, an estrogenic mycotoxin. These toxins cause vomiting, liver damage, and reproductive defects in livestock, and are harmful to humans through contaminated food. Despite great efforts to find resistance genes against F. graminearum, no completely resistant variety is currently available. Research on the biology of F. graminearum is directed towards gaining insight into more details about the infection process and reveal weak spots in the life cycle of this pathogen to develop fungicides that can protect wheat from scab infection.

Picture credit: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons (Image source) Taxonomy ID 5518

(Text from Wikipedia.)

More information General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia

Assembly

This version of the genome sequence of the PH-1 strain has been provided by Rothamsted Research and the Centre for Genome Analysis and has been submitted to the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Consortium (INSDC) as PRJEB5475.

The dataset was produced by combining the draft version of the genome previously generated by the Broad Institute using Sanger sequencing and manually annotated by the Fungal and Microbial genomics group at the Munich Information Services for Protein Sequences GCA_000240135.

In addition to filling gaps in the previous assembly, the new version has: identified a mis-assembly in chromosome 1 at the 5' end, and extended the AT rich regions, which include the identification for the first time of telomere and centromere sequences. This has increased the genomic sequence by 484,290 bp. Four previously unplaced supercontigs have been located within the new assembly or within the mitochrondrial sequence. The remaining unlocated supercontigs have been identified as repeat sequences, with all but one matched in part to the repeat sequence at the 3' end of chromosome 4 (which has not been counted in the estimate of the total genome length).

Annotation

The annotation has been imported from VEuPathDB.

Variation

Variation data has been obtained by comparing the sequenced strain PH-1 with ˜0.4-fold coverage of whole-genome shotgun sequence from a second strain of F. graminearum[, GZ3639. The identified 10,308 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) between the two strains and mapped SNP positions were directly imported from Broad Institute[. This data has also been submitted to dbSNP and is expected to be part of dbSNP 135.

References

1. Analysis of expressed sequence tags from Gibberella zeae (anamorph Fusarium graminearum).
   Trail F, Xu JR, San Miguel P, Halgren RG, Kistler HC. 2003. Fungal Genet. Biol.. 38:187-197.
2. Comparative genomics reveals mobile pathogenicity chromosomes in Fusarium.
   Ma LJ, van der Does HC, Borkovich KA, Coleman JJ, Daboussi MJ, Di Pietro A, Dufresne M, Freitag M, Grabherr M, Henrissat B et al. 2010. Nature. 464:367-373.
3. The Fusarium graminearum genome reveals a link between localized polymorphism and pathogen specialization.
   Cuomo CA, Gldener U, Xu JR, Trail F, Turgeon BG, Di Pietro A, Walton JD, Ma LJ, Baker SE, Rep M et al. 2007. Science. 317:1400-1402.