Special Interest Group Meeting

Post-genomic approaches to understanding interactions between fungi and their environment

Organiser

Ronald de Vries, Utrecht University, Netherlands
Marc Henri Lebrun, Bayer Crop Science, France

The interaction between fungi and their environment is of major importance for both saprobes and pathogens. With the current omics technologies researchers are now able to study these interactions in detail and reveal their complexity. In this session we will focus on transcriptomics, proteomics and/or metabolomics studies that significantly increase our understanding of the interaction between fungi and their enviornment. While many studies using these technologies are ongoing, a relatively small number of papers has been published so far. We hope that this session will bring people performing omics studies with fungi together and will serve as a discussion forum for this field. The session will contain 6 talks of 25 minutes, 3 of which will be on saprobic fungi and 3 on pathogenic fungi. A programme for the session will be posted around the middle of March.

Speakers

Tetsuo Koyabashi: Transcriptional regulation of genes involved in hemicellulose and cellulose utilization in Aspergillus oryzae.
This talk will focus on the influence of regulatory factors involved in (hemi-)cellulose degradation by studying the transcriptionall response using microarrays. Emphasis will be both on genes encoding (hemi-)cellulases as well as genes from the pentose catabolic pathway.

Isabelle Benoit: Zonal differentiation in sugar beet grown colonies of Aspergillus niger
Previously, zonal differentiation in Aspergillus niger colonies with respect to gene expression and protein secretion was observed on maltose and xylose. We have studied this phenomenon on a more natural substrate, sugar beet pulp, using micro array analysis and proteomics and wll demonstrate that unlike on defined sugars, the entire colony is active during growth on sugar beet pulp.

Marc-Henri Lebrun: Transcriptional analysis of rice leaves infected by Magnaporthe grisea

Jon K. Magnuson: Secretomes: Proteomic Clues to Fungal Lifestyle Choice
We have used high throughput liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS) proteomics to examine the secretomes of various fungi grown on different carbon sources. The proteomics results for the zygomycete Phycomyces blakesleeanus and the ascomycete Thielavia terrestris provide evidence of their different lifestyles.

P Spanu: High-throughput proteomics of in vivo interactions between barley and powdery mildew: insights in to genome and effector biology.

G. Doehlemann: Ustilago maydis transcriptomics. Title wil follow