Search

Abstract Background Rice blast, caused by the fungal pathogen Magnaporthe grisea, is a devastating disease causing tremendous yield loss in rice production. The public availability of the complete genome sequence of M. grisea provides ample opportunities to understand the molecular mechanism of its pathogenesis on rice plants at the transcriptome level. To identify all the expressed genes encoded in the fungal genome, we have analyzed the mycelium and appressorium transcriptomes using massively parallel signature sequencing (MPSS), robust-long serial analysis of gene expression (RL-SAGE) and oligoarray methods. Results The MPSS analyses identified 12,531 and 12,927 distinct significant tags from mycelia and appressoria, respectively, while the RL-SAGE analysis identified 16,580 distinct significant tags from the mycelial library. When matching these 12,531 mycelial and 12,927 appressorial significant tags to the annotated CDS, 500 bp upstream and 500 bp downstream of CDS, 6,735 unique genes in mycelia and 7,686 unique genes in appressoria were identified. A total of 7,135 mycelium-specific and 7,531 appressorium-specific significant MPSS tags were identified, which correspond to 2,088 and 1,784 annotated genes, respectively, when matching to the same set of reference sequences. Nearly 85% of the significant MPSS tags from mycelia and appressoria and 65% of the significant tags from the RL-SAGE mycelium library matched to the M. grisea genome. MPSS and RL-SAGE methods supported the expression of more than 9,000 genes, representing over 80% of the predicted genes in M. grisea. About 40% of the MPSS tags and 55% of the RL-SAGE tags represent novel transcripts since they had no matches in the existing M. grisea EST collections. Over 19% of the annotated genes were found to produce both sense and antisense tags in the protein-coding region. The oligoarray analysis identified the expression of 3,793 mycelium-specific and 4,652 appressorium-specific genes. A total of 2,430 mycelial genes and 1,886 appressorial genes were identified by both MPSS and oligoarray. Conclusion The comprehensive and deep transcriptome analysis by MPSS and RL-SAGE methods identified many novel sense and antisense transcripts in the M. grisea genome at two important growth stages. The differentially expressed transcripts that were identified, especially those specifically expressed in appressoria, represent a genomic resource useful for gaining a better understanding of the molecular basis of M. grisea pathogenicity. Further analysis of the novel antisense transcripts will provide new insights into the regulation and function of these genes in fungal growth, development and pathogenesis in the host plants.

To better understand the molecular basis of the defense response against the rice blast fungus (Magnaporthe grisea), a large-scale expressed sequence tag (EST) sequencing approach was used to identify genes involved in the early infection stages in rice (Oryza sativa). Six cDNA libraries were constructed using infected leaf tissues harvested from 6 conditions: resistant, partially resistant, and susceptible reactions at both 6 and 24 h after inoculation. Two additional libraries were constructed using uninoculated leaves and leaves from the lesion mimic mutant spill. A total of 68,920 ESTs were generated from 8 libraries. Clustering and assembly analyses resulted in 13,570 unique sequences from 10,934 contigs and 2,636 singletons. Gene function classification showed that 42% of the ESTs were predicted to have putative gene function. Comparison of the pathogen-challenged libraries with the uninoculated control library revealed an increase in the percentage of genes in the functional categories of defense and signal transduction mechanisms and cell cycle control, cell division, and chromosome partitioning. In addition, hierarchical clustering analysis grouped the eight libraries based on their disease reactions. A total of 7,748 new and unique ESTs were identified from our collection compared with the KOME full-length cDNA collection. Interestingly, we found that rice ESTs are more closely related to sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) ESTs than to barley (Hordeum vulgare), wheat (Triticurn aestivurn), and maize (Zea mays) ESTs. The large cataloged collection of rice ESTs in this study provides a solid foundation for further characterization of the rice defense response and is a useful public genomic resource for rice functional genomics studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Long alpha-helical coiled-coil proteins are involved in diverse organizational and regulatory processes in eukaryotic cells. They provide cables and networks in the cyto- and nucleoskeleton, molecular scaffolds that organize membrane systems and tissues, motors, levers, rotating arms, and possibly springs. Mutations in long coiled-coil proteins have been implemented in a growing number of human diseases. Using the coiled-coil prediction program MultiCoil, we have previously identified all long coiled-coil proteins from the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and have established a searchable Arabidopsis coiled-coil protein database. Results: Here, we have identified all proteins with long coiled-coil domains from 21 additional fully sequenced genomes. Because regions predicted to form coiled-coils interfere with sequence homology determination, we have developed a sequence comparison and clustering strategy based on masking predicted coiled-coil domains. Comparing and grouping all long coiled-coil proteins from 22 genomes, the kingdom-specificity of coiled-coil protein families was determined. At the same time, a number of proteins with unknown function could be grouped with already characterized proteins from other organisms. Conclusion: MultiCoil predicts proteins with extended coiled-coil domains (more than 250 amino acids) to be largely absent from bacterial genomes, but present in archaea and eukaryotes. The structural maintenance of chromosomes proteins and their relatives are the only long coiled-coil protein family clearly conserved throughout all kingdoms, indicating their ancient nature. Motor proteins, membrane tethering and vesicle transport proteins are the dominant eukaryote-specific long coiled-coil proteins, suggesting that coiled-coil proteins have gained functions in the increasingly complex processes of subcellular infrastructure maintenance and trafficking control of the eukaryotic cell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]