Project description:Aspergillus flavus and A. oryzae represent two unique species predicted to have spent centuries in vastly different environments. A. flavus is an important opportunistic plant pathogen known for contaminating crops with the carcinogenic mycotoxin, aflatoxin and A. oryzae is a domesticated fungus used in food fermentations. Remarkably, the genomes of these two species are still nearly identical. We have used the recently sequenced genomes of A. oryzae RIB40 and A. flavus NRRL3357 along with array based comparative genome hybridization (CGH) as a tool to compare genomes across several strains of these two species. A comparison of three strains from each species by CGH revealed only 42 and 129 genes unique to A. flavus and A. oryzae, respectively. Further, only 709 genes were identified as being polymorphic between the species. Despite the high degree of similarity between these two species, correlation analysis among all data from the CGH arrays for all strains used in this study reveals a species split. However, this view of species demarcation becomes muddled when focused on only those genes for secondary metabolism.
Project description:Purpose: Aflatoxin B1 is the most toxic and carcinogenic compound in nature produced by Aspergillus fungi. In our study, we applied RNA-seq to compare the transcriptomic profiles of Aspergillus flavus strains in the presence and absence of medicinal plant Zanthoxylum bungeanum. Methods: mRNA profiles of Aspergillus flavus supplemented with 250 µg/ml of methanolic extract fraction (treated samples) or DMSO (control samples) were generated in triplicate, by an Illumina platform using paired-end 150 bp sequencing strategy. Clean paired-end reads were mapped to the reference genome of A. flavus NRRL3357. Gene expression quantification was calculated by FPKM (Fragments Per Kilobase of transcript sequence per Millions base pairs sequenced). The differentially expressed genes (DGEs) between the control and test samples were analyzed using the DESeq2 R package. Results: RNA-seq produced 24.5–32.1 million clean paired-end reads (150 bp read length) per sample and most of them (83–91%) were uniquely mapped to the reference genome of A. flavus NRRL3357. Eighty-two percent of genes displayed FPKM value ≥1 and were thus classified as expressed genes. Ninety-six percent of the expressed genes were expressed both in the control and test groups whereas 2.3% and 1.8% of the genes were expressed only in the control or test group, respectively. With the combination of FPKM fold change ≥2 and adjusted p-value <0.05, we found in total 950 DEG’s. Among them, 515 genes were downregulated and 435 genes were upregulated. We used FungiFun software to analyze the functions of the DEGs based on FunCat pathways and categories. About half of the DEG’s had a relevant annotation in the FunCat database, and 60–70% of the annotated DEG’s were found to be enriched in specific functional pathways. Conclusions: we showed that simple organic extracts from Z. bungeanum inhibit both the growth and aflatoxin production by Aspergillus flavus. The repression of AF pathway is mediated by global regulators instead of pathway specific regulators AflR or AflS. Consistently, the expression of Velvet complex, a prominent regulator of fungal secondary metabolism and development, was substantially reduced. Natural compound extracts from Z. bungeanum have potential to facilitate the development of safe and economical control strategies that shutdown aflatoxin production in aflatoxigenic Aspergillus species.
Project description:Aspergillus flavus and A. oryzae represent two unique species predicted to have spent centuries in vastly different environments. A. flavus is an important opportunistic plant pathogen known for contaminating crops with the carcinogenic mycotoxin, aflatoxin and A. oryzae is a domesticated fungus used in food fermentations. Remarkably, the genomes of these two species are still nearly identical. We have used the recently sequenced genomes of A. oryzae RIB40 and A. flavus NRRL3357 along with array based comparative genome hybridization (CGH) as a tool to compare genomes across several strains of these two species. A comparison of three strains from each species by CGH revealed only 42 and 129 genes unique to A. flavus and A. oryzae, respectively. Further, only 709 genes were identified as being polymorphic between the species. Despite the high degree of similarity between these two species, correlation analysis among all data from the CGH arrays for all strains used in this study reveals a species split. However, this view of species demarcation becomes muddled when focused on only those genes for secondary metabolism. CGH comparison between 3 strains of A. flavus and 3 strains of A. oryzae, analyzed at the probe level
Project description:Objective: Aspergillus flavus aflR, a gene encoding a Zn(II)2Cys6 DNA-binding domain, is an important transcriptional regulator of the aflatoxin biosynthesis gene cluster. Our previous results of GO analysis for the binding sites of AflR in A. flavus suggest that AflR may play an integrative regulatory role. This study aimed to investigate the integrative function of the aflR gene in A. flavus. Design: In this study, we used Aspergillus flavus NRRL3357 as a wild-type strain (WT) and constructed a knockout strain of A. flavus ΔaflR by homologous recombination. Based on the transcriptomics technology, we investigated the metabolic effects of aflR gene on growth, development and toxin synthesis of A. flavus, and discussed the overall regulation mechanism of aflR gene on A. flavus at the transcriptional level. Results: The disruption of aflR severely affected the aflatoxin biosynthetic pathway, resulting in a significant decrease in aflatoxin production. In addition, disrupted strains of the aflR gene produced relatively sparse conidia and a very small number of sclerotia. However, the biosynthesis of cyclopiazonic acid (CPA) was not affected by aflR gene disruption. Transcriptomic analysis of the ΔaflR strain grown on potato dextrose agar (PDA) plates at 0 h, 24 h, and 72 h showed that expression of clustering genes involved in the biosynthesis of aflatoxin was significantly down-regulated. Meanwhile, the ΔaflR strain showed significant expression differences in genes involved in spore germination, sclerotial development, and carbohydrate metabolism compared to the WT strain. Conclusions: The results showed that the A. flavus aflR gene also played a positive role in the growth and development of fungi.