Magnaporthe oryzae Assembly and Gene Annotation

About the Magnaporthe oryzae genome

Magnaporthe oryzae (anamorph: Pyricularia grisea) also known as rice blast fungus is an important plant pathogen isolated from rice and a variety of other rice field weeds. It affects all growth stages of the plant with severe damage during the seedling stage. This fungi generates spores that can easily be dispersed by wind and splashing rain. The spores can spend the Winter in rice grains and rice stubble and can infect new crops the following year. Infection is more likely over long periods of rain or high humidity. There are known strains of rice resistant to this disease that may be helpful for it control. Magnaporthe oryzae is the most important rice pathogen worldwide known to occur in 85 countries. Every year, the losses in crops due to rice blast could feed 60 million people. The Magnaporthe oryzae genome was release as part of the Magnaporthe comparative database, it as size of 41.03 Mb and encodes about 12,593 protein-coding genes.

Picture credit: Donald Groth

"Magnaporthe comparative Sequencing Project
", Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT,

Annotation

The genome sequence, assembly and protein coding genes annotation of the Magnaporthe oryzae (strain 70-15) genome have been generated by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard under the Magnaporthe comparative database sequencing project.

Non coding RNA genes have been annotated using tRNAScan-SE (Lowe, T.M. and Eddy, S.R. 1997), RFAM (Griffiths-Jones et al 2005), and RNAmmer (Lagesen K.,et al 2007); additional analysis tools have also been applied.

References

1. Identification and analysis of in planta expressed genes of Magnaporthe oryzae.
   Kim S, Park J, Park SY, Mitchell TK, Lee YH. 2010. BMC Genomics. 11:104.

Other Data

'Expressed Sequence Tags' (ESTs) from dbEST are aligned to the genome using Exonerate.

More information

General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia.