U6 small nuclear RNAs are part of the splicing machinery. They exhibit several unique features setting them appart from other snRNAs. Reports of introns in structured non-coding RNAs have been very rare. U6 genes, however, were found to be interrupted by an intron in several Schizosaccharomyces species and in 2 Basidiomycota. We conducted a homology search across 147 currently available fungal ...

Rice blast is a recurrent fungal disease, and resistance to fungal infection is a complex trait. Therefore, a comprehensive examination of rice transcriptome and its variation during fungal infection is necessary to understand the complex gene regulatory networks. In this study, adopting Next-Generation Sequencing we profiled the transcriptomes and microRNAomes of rice varieties, one susceptibl...

Novel families of short interspersed nuclear element (SINE) sequences in the human pathogenic fungus Aspergillus fumigatus, clinical isolate Af293, were identified and categorised into tRNA-related and 5S rRNA-related SINEs. Eight predicted tRNA-related SINE families originating from different tRNAs, and nominated as AfuSINE2 sequences, contained target site duplications of short direct repeat ...

Messenger RNA of eukaryotic cells and most of their viruses carry a ‘cap’ structure at their 5 end. RNA 5 -triphosphatase (RTPase) activity is required for the first step of cap biosynthesis. This activity removes the -phosphate from the 5 end of a nascent mRNA to leave a diphosphate end. mRNA guanylyltransferase (GTase) subsequently adds GMP in a 5 –5 orientation to form the structure, GpppN1-...

Rhizoctonia solani represents an important plant pathogenic Basidiomycota species complex and the host of many different mycoviruses, as indicated by frequent detection of dsRNA elements in natural populations of the fungus. To date, eight different mycoviruses have been characterized in Rhizoctonia and some of them have been reported to modulate its virulence. DsRNA extracts of the avirulent R...

• Here, the reliability of published fungal nucleic acid sequences is tested by the critical re-evaluation of 206 named sequences obtained from public-access databases. • Sequences from the ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene cluster were examined as these are commonly used to establish fungal phylogeny and evolution, and are also increasingly employed in the identification of fungi from nonculture based...

Novel high-throughput sequencing methods outperform earlier approaches in terms of resolution and magnitude. They enable identification and relative quantification of community members and offer new insights into fungal community ecology. These methods are currently taking over as the primary tool to assess fungal communities of plant-associated endophytes, pathogens, and mycorrhizal symbionts,...

Microbial ecologists have used direct RT-PCR amplification of 16S rRNA molecules for the detection of active species of bacteria and archaea, and 18S rRNA molecules for the detection of active fungi. The drawback to this approach for fungi is that 18S rRNA sequences often do not provide sufficient taxonomic resolution to allow identification of taxa in mixed communities to genus or species leve...

White nose syndrome (WNS) is caused by the psychrophilic fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans that can grow in the environment saprotrophically or parasitically by infecting hibernating bats. Infections are pathological in many species of North American bats, disrupting hibernation and causing mortality. To determine what fungal pathways are involved in infection of living tissue, we examined fu...

Fungal invasive infections are an increasing health problem. The intrinsic complexity of pathogenic fungi and the unmet clinical need for new and more effective treatments requires a detailed knowledge of the infection process. During infection, fungal pathogens are able to trigger a specific transcriptional program in their host cells. The detailed knowledge of this transcriptional program wil...