Collaborative Research: Evolution of Systems Biology Underlying Fruiting Body Development in Fungi

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Fungi are important pathogens of agricultural crops and humans, as well as beneficial root associates maintaining the health of our forests. Most fungi lack the ability to actively move. Instead, they grow vegetatively as hyphae, then spread from one location to another using spores that are carried by the wind. This project compares and contrasts the development of fruiting bodies of fungi that thrive in different environments, examining how fruiting body structure has adapted to a variety of environments. The project will identify genes that are responsible for adaptation of fungal fruiting bodies to different environments. The resulting understanding of fruiting body structure will yield basic science for novel control mechanisms that curtail the survival and dispersal of pathogenic spores. The proposed project will reach beyond the advancement of fundamental scientific research to benefit society by building on a successful outreach program that supports an environmental venture of fungal fruiting body cultivation at local urban high schools in New York City and Philadelphia. In addition, the project will bring fungal biology curricula to local students, addressing the Michigan state third grade standards, and to the MSU 4H Children's Garden.Shifts in gene expression underlie the interaction of developmental processes that drive the differentiation of tissues and the evolution of new morphologies in multicellular organisms. However, studies of how emergent properties of these interactions lead to novel, complex phenotypes that elucidate the evolutionary processes of developmental mechanisms are challenging in complex organisms. Fungi in the Phylum Ascomycota, a group that includes numerous important plant and animal pathogens, provide model systems for these studies as they are easily manipulated, develop fruiting structures with a few well-characterized tissue types on common media, and have genomic resources that enable comparative and functional analyses. The proposed research will use comparative transcriptional profiling and functional characterization coupled with phenotypic analyses to reveal developmental mechanisms underlying several key morphologies of fungal fruiting bodies, and to reveal the evolutionary processes by which these morphological innovations arose and diverged across a set of fungi. The research will reveal the genetic basis of a greater scope of morphological features of functional importance, associated with niche adaptation, for fungal fruiting bodies in the expanded six genera, and identify the roles and interactions of transcription factors in the evolution of the fruiting body development in two model species, F. graminearum and N. crassa. As the first systems biological analysis of developmental divergence in fungi, this research will provide an insightful comparison to well-known examples of developmental systems in microbes, plants, and animals. By studying these diverse multicellular systems, we gain a better understanding of the constraints and potentialities that shape developmental biology.