Post-genomic approaches to understanding interactions between fungi and their environment

Ronald P De Vries,Scott E Baker,Isabelle Benoit,Jon K Magnuson,Marc-Henri Lebrun,Ellen A Panisko,Tetsuo Kobayashi,Gunther Doehlemann

doi:10.5598/imafungus.2011.02.01.11

Abstract

Fungi inhabit every natural and anthropogenic environment on Earth. They have highly varied life-styles including saprobes (using only dead biomass as a nutrient source), pathogens (feeding on living biomass), and symbionts (co-existing with other organisms). These distinctions are not absolute as many species employ several life styles (e.g. saprobe and opportunistic pathogen, saprobe and mycorrhiza). To efficiently survive in these different and often changing environments, fungi need to be able to modify their physiology and in some cases will even modify their local environment. Understanding the interaction between fungi and their environments has been a topic of study for many decades. However, recently these studies have reached a new dimension. The availability of fungal genomes and development of post-genomic technologies for fungi, such as transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, have enabled more detailed studies into this topic resulting in new insights. Based on a Special Interest Group session held during IMC9, this paper provides examples of the recent advances in using (post-)genomic approaches to better understand fungal interactions with their environments.

Highlights

The interaction between fungi and their environment is of major importance for saprobes, symbionts and pathogens and has been a topic of study for many decades
The availability of fungal genomes and development of postgenomic technologies for fungi, such as transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, have enabled more detailed studies into this topic resulting in new insights
Based on a Special Interest Group session held during IMC9, this paper provides examples of the recent advances in usinggenomic approaches to better understand fungal interactions with their environments

Summary

Introduction

The interaction between fungi and their environment is of major importance for saprobes, symbionts and pathogens and has been a topic of study for many decades. The first report of this phenomenon described that protein secretion and growth only took place the periphery of colonies of Aspergillus niger grown on maltose (Wösten et al 1991) To study this phenomenon in more detail, a specific growth system was developed called the ring-plate system (Levin et al 2007b). This membrane allows transport of nutrients and proteins, but the pores are too small to allow passage of fungal hyphae Using this system it was shown that protein secretion and growth, and overall gene expression is highly differentiated in colonies of A. niger grown on maltose or D-xylose (Levin et al 2007a). Genes involved in nitrate utilisation were only expressed in the periphery of the colony, even though there was no significant difference in the nitrate concentration in the zones (Levin et al 2007a)

Interactions between fungi and their environment

Findings

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