Aspergillus oryzae, an important filamentous fungus used in food fermentation and the enzyme industry, has been shown through genome sequencing and various other tools to have prominent features in its genomic composition. However, the functional complexity of the A. oryzae transcriptome has not yet been fully elucidated. Here, we applied direct high-throughput paired-end RNA-sequencing (RNA-Se...

The filamentous fungus Aspergillus oryzae is a well-known expression host used to express homologous and heterologous proteins in a number of industrial applications. To facilitate higher yields of proteins of interest, we constructed the pAsOP vector to express heterologous proteins in A. oryzae. pAsOP carries a selectable marker, pyrG, derived from Aspergillus nidulans, and a strong promoter ...

Rice blast caused by Magnaporthe oryzae is a devastating disease of rice. Mechanisms of rice resistance to blast have been studied extensively, and the rice-M. oryzae pathosystem has become a model for plant-microbe interaction studies. However, the mechanisms of non-host resistance (NHR) to rice blast in other plants remain poorly understood. We found that penetration resistance to M. oryzae i...

Acidovorax sp. strain MR-S7 was isolated from activated sludge in a treatment system for wastewater containing β-lactam antibiotic pollutants. Strain MR-S7 demonstrates multidrug resistance for various types of β-lactam antibiotics at high levels of MIC. The draft genome sequence clarified that strain MR-S7 harbors unique β-lactamase genes.

The fungus Harpophora oryzae is a close relative of the pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae and a beneficial endosymbiont of wild rice. Here, we show that H. oryzae evolved from a pathogenic ancestor. The overall genomic structures of H. and M. oryzae were found to be similar. However, during interactions with rice, the expression of 11.7% of all genes showed opposing trends in the two fungi, suggestin...

Aspergillus flavus is the main etiological agent for aflatoxin contamination of crops. Its close relative, A. oryzae, does not produce aflatoxins and has been widely used to produce fermented foods. We compared the phylogeny of A. oryzae isolates and L- and S-type sclerotial isolates of A. flavus using single nucleotide polymorphisms in the omtA gene in the aflatoxin biosynthesis gene cluster a...

Delineating species and epidemic lineages in fungal plant pathogens is critical to our understanding of disease emergence and the structure of fungal biodiversity and also informs international regulatory decisions. Pyricularia oryzae (syn. Magnaporthe oryzae) is a multihost pathogen that infects multiple grasses and cereals, is responsible for the most damaging rice disease (rice blast), and i...

We evaluated the inducibility of nitrate-dependent Fe(II)-EDTA oxidation (NDFO) in non-growth, chloramphenicol-amended, resting-cell suspensions of Dechloromonas sp. strain UWNR4 and Acidovorax sp. strain 2AN. Cells previously incubated with Fe(II)-EDTA oxidized ca. 6-fold more Fe(II)-EDTA than cells previously incubated with Fe(III)-EDTA. This is the first report of induction of NDFO by Fe(II).