Alternative splicing as an element of signal transduction in multi-step phosphorelay systems of fungi

微生物（尤其是病原真菌）与环境甚至宿主“交流”的基本机制是当前的研究课题。信号转导是高度复杂的，必须允许微生物在病原体/宿主相互作用或病原体/环境相互作用期间与有限数量的信号蛋白反应许多不同的刺激。许多不同的外部刺激的数量必须首先被微生物感知并转化为可运输的信号，这些信号可以被细胞“处理”。这是由几个传感器蛋白通过磷酸化实现的。目前尚不清楚进一步的信号传播究竟是如何发生的，因为在大多数致病真菌中，只有一种单一的磷酸转移蛋白（Ypd1p）存在，用于将所有不同的信号转导到细胞内的目标位置，在那里它们依次启动不同的反应。在初步研究中，我们可以通过植物病原真菌Magnaporthe oryzae的初始NGS转录和蛋白质组学数据显示，单基因序列MoYPD1产生了不同的转录物和蛋白质亚型。这导致了一种假设，即Ypd1p蛋白的不同（可能是信号特异性的）同工型是通过选择性剪接形成的，这使得信号转导具有更高的可变性和特异性。我们希望在拟议的研究项目中，在遗传和蛋白质生化水平上广泛地检验这一假设。

The basic mechanisms that enable microorganisms (especiallypathogenic fungi) to "communicate" with their environment or even with their hosts are current research topics. Signal transduction is highly complex and must allow the microorganisms to react with a limited number of signaling proteins to many different stimuli during pathogen/host interactions or pathogen/environmental interactions. The quantity of many different external stimuli must first be percepted and converted by the microorganisms into transportable signals, which can be "processed" by the cell. This is achieved by several sensor proteins via phosphorylation. It is not known how the further signal propagation takes place exactly, since in most pathogenic fungi only one single phosphotransfer protein (Ypd1p) exists for signal transduction of all different signals to the target location within the cell, where they in turn initiate different reactions. In preliminary studies, we could show by means of initial NGS transcription and proteomics data from the phytopathogenic fungus Magnaporthe oryzae that different transcript- and protein-isoforms emerge from the single gene sequence MoYPD1. This results in the hypothesis that different, possibly signal-specific, isoforms of the protein Ypd1p are formed via alternative splicing and these enable a higher variability and specificity in the signal transduction. We want to examine this hypothesis extensively at the genetic and protein biochemical level in the proposed research project.