Nature, Vol. 422, pp. 859-868
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The genome sequence of the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa
James E. Galagan*,
Sarah E. Calvo,
Katherine A. Borkovich,
Eric U. Selker,
Nick D. Read,
David Jaffe,
William FitzHugh,
Li-Jun Ma,
Serge Smirnov,
Seth Purcell,
Bushra Rehman,
Timothy Elkins,
Reinhard Engels,
Shunguang Wang,
Cydney B. Nielsen,
Jonathan Butler,
Matthew Endrizzi,
Dayong Qui,
Peter Ianakiev,
Deborah Bell-Pedersen,
Mary Anne Nelson,
Margaret Werner-Washburne,
Claude P. Selitrennikoff,
John A. Kinsey,
Edward L. Braun,
Alex Zelter,
Ulrich Schulte,
Gregory O. Kothe,
Gregory Jedd,
Werner Mewes,
Chuck Staben,
Edward Marcotte,
David Greenberg,
Alice Roy,
Karen Foley,
Jerome Naylor,
Nicole Stange-Thomann,
Robert Barrett,
Sante Gnerre,
Michael Kamal,
Manolis Kamvysselis,
Evan Mauceli,
Cord Bielke,
Stephen Rudd,
Dmitrij Frishman,
Svetlana Krystofova,
Carolyn Rasmussen,
Robert L. Metzenberg,
David D. Perkins,
Scott Kroken,
Carlo Cogoni,
Giuseppe Macino,
David Catcheside,
Weixi Li,
Robert J. Pratt,
Stephen A. Osmani,
Colin P. C. DeSouza,
Louise Glass,
Marc J. Orbach,
J. Andrew Berglund,
Rodger Voelker,
Oded Yarden,
Michael Plamann,
Stephan Seiler,
Jay Dunlap,
Alan Radford,
Rodolfo Aramayo,
Donald O. Natvig,
Lisa A. Alex,
Gertrud Mannhaupt,
Daniel J. Ebbole,
Michael Freitag,
Ian Paulsen,
Matthew S. Sachs,
Eric S. Lander,
Chad Nusbaum, and
Bruce Birren*
The full list of author affiliations is available from the journal web site.
Sequencing of the Neurospora crassa genome was conducted by the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research
and the WICGR database for Neurospora is available here.
Neurospora crassa, is a central organism in the history of
twentieth-century genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology.
Here, we report a high-quality draft sequence of the N. crassa
genome. The approximately 40-megabase genome encodes about
10,000 protein-coding genes‹more than twice as many as in the
fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe and only about 25% fewer than
in the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster. Analysis of the gene
set yields insights into unexpected aspects of Neurospora biology
including the identification of genes potentially associated with red light
photobiology, genes implicated in secondary metabolism, and important differences
in Ca2+ signalling as compared with plants and animals. Neurospora
possesses the widest array of genome defence mechanisms known for
any eukaryotic organism, including a process unique to fungi called
repeat-induced point mutation (RIP). Genome analysis suggests
that RIP has had a profound impact on genome evolution, greatly slowing the
creation of new genes through genomic duplication and resulting in a
genome with an unusually low proportion of closely related genes.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation with additional funding from
the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, The Israel Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health
* Corresponding authors
Link to a WICGR press release describing the impact of the Neurospora genome sequence upon the future of fungal biology.