Ustilago maydis Assembly and Gene Annotation

About the Ustilago maydis genome

Ustilago maydis is the causal agent of the corn smut crop disease. This basidiomycete can infect any part of the plant but usually it reaches the ovaries which causes the kernels to grow into large greyish tumors. The infected kernels are known as
"huitlacoche
" in Mexico and are used in the preparation of meals. This species is one of the most well studied plant pathogens and an important model organism for studying plant-pathogen interactions. The Ustilago maydis genome was released in June 2003 consisting of a 10X whole-genome shotgun assembly with a size of 19.68 Mb and encodes about 6500 protein-coding genes.

Annotation

The genome sequence, assembly and protein coding genes annotation of the Ustilago maydis (strain 521) genome have been generated by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard under the Ustilago maydis 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. Fungal dimorphism regulated gene expression in Ustilago maydis: II. Filament down-regulated genes.
   Garca-Pedrajas MD, Gold SE. 2004. Mol. Plant Pathol.. 5:295-307.
2. Gene discovery and transcript analyses in the corn smut pathogen Ustilago maydis: expressed sequence tag and genome sequence comparison.
   Ho EC, Cahill MJ, Saville BJ. 2007. BMC Genomics. 8:334.
3. Gene expression and EST analyses of Ustilago maydis germinating teliospores.
   Sacadura NT, Saville BJ. 2003. Fungal Genet. Biol.. 40:47-64.
4. Gene expression during Ustilago maydis diploid filamentous growth: EST library creation and analyses.
   Nugent KG, Choffe K, Saville BJ. 2004. Fungal Genet. Biol.. 41:349-360.
5. Insights from the genome of the biotrophic fungal plant pathogen Ustilago maydis.
   Kmper J, Kahmann R, Blker M, Ma LJ, Brefort T, Saville BJ, Banuett F, Kronstad JW, Gold SE, Mller O et al. 2006. Nature. 444:97-101.

Picture credit: Picture credit: Ninjatacoshell

Other data

• EST sequences from Ho et al. and Nugent et al. were aligned to the genome with Exonerate [View data]

More information

General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia.