Special Interest Group Meeting

Molecular resources and mutant libraries for fungi

Carol Munro, University of Aberdeen

Genome wide applications are common place in fungal research augmented by the ever increasing number of fungal genomes that have been sequenced. This trend is likely to keep increasing with the reduced cost and increased accessibility of next generation sequencing. Despite the efforts of many research groups a significant percentage of fungal genes encode proteins of unknown function. Therefore there is a community-wide need to develop genome-wide mutant collections and libraries in order to; systematically investigate uncharacterised genes, improve fungal genome annotations and increase our understanding of fungal biology. Currently available mutant collections will be described focussing on the model human pathogen Candida albicans. A joint initiative “the Candida albicans ORFeomeproject” between the groups of Christophe d’Enfert, Institut Pasteur and Carol Munro, University of Aberdeen, has been funded by the Wellcome Trust.

The Candida albicans ORFeomeproject will create three new resources for the Candida community: (1) a C. albicans ORFeome library by cloning every predicted ORF into a Gateway® vector in E. coli, (2) a library of bar-coded C. albicans over-expression vectors by placing each ORF under the control of a reverse tetracycline promoter in a C. albicans integrative plasmid based on CIp10 and (3) a library of C. albicans strains each over-expressing a single gene by integrating the plasmids generated in (2) into the RPS1 chromosomal locus. Each ORF will be fully verified by Solexa sequencing. The 3 collections will be made available to the community when they are completed and distributed for a small fee that will cover maintenance and distribution costs. These resources will be the foundation for the development of genome-wide over-expression screens and facilitate a number of other initiatives within the research community.