Evolutionary genomics of pathogens
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Welcome Juliana - our visitor from Brazil working on smut fungi

29/4/2016

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Post by Juliana Benevenuto

​I am a PhD student in Brazil at the University of São Paulo (USP/ESALQ) funded by a scholarship from FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation). I am developing a part of my research project in collaboration with the “Pathogen Genomics” group led by Daniel Croll. My project aims to understand the evolution of host specialization in smut fungi using comparative genomics approaches. Despite being phylogenetically close, smut species infect different Poaceae hosts, differ in their mode of plant colonization and show different symptoms development. Comparative genomics of species isolated from maize, barley, sugarcane, sorghum, oat and wheat will provide insights into the core set of genes that are responsible for host specificity and will improve our understanding of virulence factors in these important pathosystems. Single-copy orthologous gene sets identified by comparative genomics will also help to build more accurate phylogenies and improve estimates of divergence times among the species.

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The origin of the Bangladesh wheat blast outbreak in 2016

26/4/2016

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Wheat blast is a fungal disease that leads to large yield losses. In February 2016, wheat blast was first found in Bangladesh. This was the first report of the disease in Asia. The disease already caused large yield losses and there is a significant worry that the disease will rapidly spread to wheat production areas in India and beyond.

The key piece of genomic information was gathered by the teams of Sophien Kamoun at The Sainsbury Laboratory, Diane Saunders at The Genome Analysis Centre, and Tofazzal Islam of the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Agricultural University. These teams collected infected leaves from the field, sequenced a significant portion of the pathogen's genome and made the data instantly available.

We performed genomic and phylogenetic analyses to identify the nature and likely origin of the Bangladesh outbreak strains. We have summarised our findings here on github: https://github.com/crolllab/wheat-blast
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