Nicholas J Talbot

..Finally, the likely mechanisms that promote genetic diversity in M. grisea and our current understanding of the population structure of the blast fungus are evaluated...

..grisea to complete its prepenetration phase of development and enter the host plant...

..Taken together, our findings provide evidence that Pth2 plays a role in the generation of acetyl CoA pools necessary for appressorium function and rapid elaboration of penetration hyphae during host infection...

..Nuclear degeneration in the spore is known to be essential for plant infection, but the precise mechanism by which it occurs is not known...

..This provides the first genetic evidence that disulphide bridges in a hydrophobin are dispensable for aggregation, but essential for secretion...

..Mmt1 appears to be distributed in the inner side of the cell wall of the fungus. These findings indicate that Mmt1-like metallothioneins may play a novel role in fungal cell wall biochemistry that is required for fungal virulence...

..Our results indicate that the glyoxylate cycle is also important in this plant pathogenic fungus, demonstrating the widespread utility of the pathway in microbial pathogenesis...

..A genome-wide analysis therefore demonstrates the importance of infection-associated, nonselective autophagy for the establishment of rice blast disease...

..Our study suggests that genetic exchange between plants and fungi is exceedingly rare, particularly among the angiosperms, but has occurred during their evolutionary history and added important metabolic traits to plant lineages...

..oryzae and demonstrate that differentiation of appressoria requires a cytokinetic event that is distinct from cell divisions within hyphae...

..Impairment of autophagy, by the targeted mutation of the MgATG8 gene, arrested conidial cell death but rendered the fungus nonpathogenic. Thus, the initiation of rice blast requires autophagic cell death of the conidium...

..These data are consistent with the hypothesis that some oomycetes became successful plant parasites by multiple acquisitions of genes from fungi...

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..oryzae requires a regulatory mechanism involving an NADPH sensor protein, Tps1, a set of NADP-dependent transcriptional corepressors, and the nonconsuming interconversion of NADPH and NADP acting as signal transducer...

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..grisea, while trehalose degradation is important for efficient development of the fungus in plant tissue following initial infection...

..The nature of biotrophic proliferation of fungal pathogens in host tissue has recently revealed new potential mechanisms for cell-to-cell movement by invading pathogens...

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..Large-scale insertional mutagenesis is now allowing the rapid analysis of gene function in M. grisea, heralding a new approach to the study of this important fungal pathogen...

..The initiation of rice blast disease therefore requires production of superoxide by the invading pathogen...

..oryzae. We also look ahead to the key questions that need to be addressed to provide a better understanding of the molecular processes that lead to plant disease and the prospects for sustainable control of rice blast...

..Importantly, alliinase is also able to use different substrates, therefore paving the way to a range of novel, binary antimicrobial systems with custom-made chemical and biochemical properties...

..oryzae to cause rice blast disease in the absence of Slp1. We propose that Slp1 sequesters chitin oligosaccharides to prevent PAMP-triggered immunity in rice, thereby facilitating rapid spread of the fungus within host tissue...

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..Recognition of microbes by these receptors induces defence responses that protect hosts against potential microbial attack...

..New querying functions and large sequence sets from a variety of phytopathogenic species will be incorporated in due course...

..The results demonstrate the potential of comparative genome analysis for exploring the evolution of eukaryotic microbial pathogenesis...

..These data implicate cyclophilins as virulence factors in phytopathogenic fungi and also provide evidence that calcineurin signaling is required for infection structure formation by Magnaporthe...

..When considered together, these data suggest that appressorium-mediated plant infection is coordinated by three distinct cell cycle checkpoints that are necessary for establishment of plant disease...

..This sub-set of fungal isolates produced greater numbers of unique metabolites than those selected indiscriminately...

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..in naturally infested composts. The specificity of this technique was confirmed by phylogenetic analysis based on sequences of the ITS1-5.8S-ITS2 rRNA-encoding regions of the isolates...

..MST12 may play important roles in regulating penetration peg formation and directing the physical forces exerted by the appressorium turgor in mature appressoria...

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..Significantly, this form of cell death is a prerequisite for plant infection and fungal pathogenesis and part of a growing body of evidence implicating autophagy as a key process in fungal developmental biology...

..The M. grisea genome has been subject to invasion and proliferation of active transposable elements, reflecting the clonal nature of this fungus imposed by widespread rice cultivation...

..These analyses have been collated in the e-Fungi data warehouse, providing an online resource for comparative genomic analysis of the fungi...

..This was not supported by the phenotypic analysis of DeltaHCf-6 strains. Hydrophobins may play distinct roles due to precisely regulated spatial localisation during infection-related development of C. fulvum...

..Taken together, these results demonstrate that Tps1 is a central regulator for integration of carbon and nitrogen metabolism, and plays a pivotal role in the establishment of plant disease...

..Furthermore, comparative analyses benefit from close integration of derived data sets that cluster genes or organisms in a way that eases the expression of requests that clarify points of similarity or difference between species...

..Results from the IF and IES procedures can be obtained within 4-5 h. Sample preparation for IEM takes approximately 4 days. Gold labeling and visualization of samples can be completed within 4 h...

..Comparative analyses of these sequences will provide new insights into the genomic plasticity and evolution of parasitism and mutualism in fungi...