( ction. The primary mission is to un...)Researchers uncover sequence of major rice pathogen

"The primary mission is to uncover the organism's weaknesses. You do that by building up an arsenal of information of what genes are involved in plant-pathogen interactions," Dean says.

In July 2002, Dean and researchers from the Whitehead Institute at MIT, now called the Broad Institute, issued a preliminary genome sequence of M. grisea, and made it publicly available so other researchers could work to solve the problems rice blast presents.

"That work decoded the string of letters that comprise the genome," Dean says. "This paper shows the work of the last two years in bringing this genome to life."

Bringing the genome to life means capturing the biological meaning of the genome, Dean says. To do this, he and his colleagues used two strategies: comparative genomics and functional genomics.

"In comparative genomics, you compare this genome to that of other organisms, other fungi," Dean says. "But fungi are very diverse; they've evolved tremendously. Fungi within the same family are as dissimilar as man is to a frog."

In functional genomics, Dean explains, scientists use comparative genomics to get hints about where to concentrate their study efforts.

"M. grisea contains about 11,000 genes, so you can't look at every one," he says. "The comparative study allows us to look at novel classes of genes and novel proteins and prioritize study efforts."

"The Genome Sequence of the Rice Blast Fungus Magnaporthe grisea" Authors: Ralph Dean, Thomas Mitchell, Resham Kulkarni, Huaqin Pan, Ignazio Carbone, Doug Brown, Yeon Yee, Nicole Donofrio, Robert Nicol, North Carolina State University; et al
Published: April 21, 2005, in Nature

Abstract: Magnaporthe grisea is the most destructive pathogen of rice worldwide and the principal model organism for elucidating the molecular basis of fungal disease of plants. Here, we report the draft sequence of the M. grisea genome. Analysis of the gene set prov
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Source:North Carolina State University