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

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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.