Excess fatty acids and sterols are stored as triacylglycerols and sterol esters in
specialized cellular organelles, called lipid droplets. Understanding what determines the cellular
amount of neutral lipids and their packaging into lipid droplets is of fundamental and
applied interest. Using two species of fission yeast, we show that cycling...
Neurospora crassa has been for decades a principal model for filamentous
fungal genetics and physiology as well as for understanding
the mechanism of circadian clocks. Eukaryotic fungal and animal
clocks comprise transcription-translation-based feedback loops that
control rhythmic transcription of a substantial fraction of these transcriptomes,
yielding the changes in protein...
The filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa responds to light in complex ways. To thoroughly study the transcriptional response of this organism to light, RNA-seq was used to analyze capped and polyadenylated mRNA prepared from mycelium grown for 24 hr in the dark and then exposed to light for 0 (control) 15,...
Global change and its associated temperature increase has directly or indirectly changed the distributions of hosts and pathogens, and has affected host immunity, pathogen virulence and growth rates. This has resulted in increased disease in natural plant and animal populations worldwide, including scleractinian corals. While the effects of temperature increase...
In response to genotoxic stress, ATR and ATM kinases phosphorylate H2A in fungi and H2AX in animals on a C-terminal serine. The resulting modified histone, called γH2A, recruits chromatin-binding proteins that stabilize stalled replication forks or promote DNA double-strand-break repair. To identify genomic loci that might be prone to replication...
Fungal hyphae are among the most highly polarized cells. Hyphal polarized growth is supported by tip-directed transport of secretory vesicles, which accumulate temporarily in a stratified manner in an apical vesicle cluster, the Spitzenkörper. The exocyst complex is required for tethering of secretory vesicles to the apical plasma membrane. We...
Plant pathogens secrete an arsenal of small secreted proteins (SSPs) acting as effectors that modulate host immunity to facilitate infection. SSP-encoding genes are often located in particular genomic environments and show waves of concerted expression at diverse stages of plant infection. To date, little is known about the regulation of...