Evolution and functional characterization of virulent strain-specific genes in Colletotrichum

了解病原体中的毒力是如何出现的，有助于开发更好的疾病控制方法。我们在炭疽菌真菌中发现了一组毒力强的菌株特有的基因，这些基因导致草莓炭疽病在多个物种之间具有不均匀的系统发育分布。在2020财年，完成了以下工作：1.提交的论文描述了亚端粒区域和富含重复序列的染色体上潜在的毒力基因簇。这项工作以及相关的基因组和转录组数据已经在NCBI、GitHub和BioRxiv上公开发布，目前正在《基因组研究》杂志上进行审查。对潜在毒力基因簇中的一种蛋白质CfNudex进行了进一步鉴定。对包括CfNudex在内的所有果蝇进行了系统发育分析，以确定最接近的序列，通过与先前描述的线虫的同源性来识别潜在的底物。在已知的Nudex底物上测试纯化的CfNudex的底物专一性。

Understanding how virulence emerges in pathogens can contribute to the development of better methods of disease control. We discovered a virulent strain-specific cluster of genes in Colletotrichum fungi which cause strawberry anthracnose that has an uneven phylogenetic distribution across multiple species. In FY2020, the following was achieved:1. Submitted paper describing potential virulence gene clusters in sub-telomeric regions and repeat-rich chromosomes. The work and associated genome and transcriptome data has been publicly released on NCBI, github and Biorxiv and is currently under review in the journal Genome Research.2. One of the proteins present in the potential virulence gene cluster, CfNudix, was characterized further. Phylogenetic analyses of all C. fructicola nudixes including CfNudix was carried out to determine the most closely related sequences to identify potential substrates by homology to previously characterized nudixes. The substrate specificity of purified CfNudix was tested on known nudix substrates.