Comparative genomics of fungi

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Fungi are of primary importance in organic matter degradation, as well as having major economic significance as agents of diseases of plants and animals, and in industrial fermentation. Fungi generally have the smallest genome sizes among higher eukaryotes. Consequently, there are more genomes of fungi sequenced than those of animals or plants, with over 45 fungal genomes publicly available to date. The fungal genomes sequenced and the advanced annotation provide a data-rich resource with easy accessibility. I propose to examine the biology and evolution of fungi and some other promising microbial eukaryotes such as slime molds (myxomycota) using genetic data from online sources supplemented by data obtained experimentally in my research program. The purpose of this work is to investigate the evolutionary relationships of fungi, myxomycota and other microbial eukaryotes by searching for new gene sequences with or without annotation from sequenced genomes which may be useful in phylogenetic analyses at various levels, and supplementing the existing sequences and data with wet lab work. These objectives are part of a long term program investigating the evolution and biology of fungi, using the new tools of comparative genomics combined with basic sequencing and sequence analysis techniques. Their eukaryotic nature and small genome sizes make fungi particularly valuable in comparative genomics, and, with the exponentially increasing amounts of sequence data, it is now possible to access and analyse these data to bring forth important discoveries of biological significance.