Blumeria graminis Assembly and Gene Annotation

Blumeria graminis is an ascomycete fungus responsible for powdery mildew in a variety of grasses, including economically important cereals such as barley and wheat, causing falls in yields of up to 40%. Its genome exhibits considerable variability, allowing the evolution of strains that are able to infect previously resistant crop varieties, or that exhibit fungicide resistance.

Assembly

Blumeria graminis f.sp. hordei isolate DH14 was re-sequenced at the Earlham Institute (formally known as The Genome Analysis Centre, Norwich, United Kingdom) and deposited at the ENA as PRJEB23502. The current assembly (version 4) incorporates the previously available data used for the version EF2/version 3 and contains 323 scaffolds containing 963 contigs. Associated data for the additional long-read assembly of the isolate RACE1 can be found also at the ENA as PRJEB23162.

Annotation

This annotation of Blumeria graminis is the product of a comprehensive manual review undertaken by the Blumeria graminis community, supported by Ensembl Genomes. Members of the B. graminis community were trained by Ensembl Genomes to use Apollo (a web-based gene editing tool). This process used dense transcriptomics data as evidence, resulting in 7118 protein coding genes (an increase of 648 genes from the previous annotation). This curation effort resulted in several improvements to the gene set including the addition of UTRs to the gene models, correction of gene boundaries and exons, and the discovery of nearly 650 new genes.

Functional annotation and comparative analyses were conducted on this revised gene set through the Ensembl Genomes pipelines, and made available in release 39.

References

1. Signatures of host specialization and a recent transposable element burst in the dynamic one-speed genome of the fungal barley powdery mildew pathogen.
   Frantzeskakis L, Kracher B, Kusch S, Yoshikawa-Maekawa M, Bauer S, Pedersen C, Spanu PD, Maekawa T, Schulze-Lefert P, Panstruga R.
   1. BMC Genomics. 19
2. Genome expansion and gene loss in powdery mildew fungi reveal tradeoffs in extreme parasitism.
   Spanu PD, Abbott JC, Amselem J, Burgis TA, Soanes DM, Stber K, Ver Loren van Themaat E, Brown JK, Butcher SA, Gurr SJ et al. 2010. Science. 330:1543-1546.

More information

General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia.