Examining the evolution of the regulatory circuit controlling secondary metabolism and development in the fungal genus Aspergillus.

ABSTRACT: Filamentous fungi produce diverse secondary metabolites (SMs) essential to their ecology and adaptation. Although each SM is typically produced by only a handful of species, global SM production is governed by widely conserved transcriptional regulators in conjunction with other cellular processes, such as development. We examined the interplay between the taxonomic narrowness of SM distribution and the broad conservation of global regulation of SM and development in Aspergillus, a diverse fungal genus whose members produce well-known SMs such as penicillin and gliotoxin. Evolutionary analysis of the 2,124 genes comprising the 262 SM pathways in four Aspergillus species showed that most SM pathways were species-specific, that the number of SM gene orthologs was significantly lower than tha

SUBMITTER: Lind AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4364702 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature