Research Accomplishment Reports 2007

A Genome Sequence for the Model Hemibiotroph Colletotrichum graminicola

L.J. Vaillancourt, L.J. Ma, M. Thon
Department of Plant Pathology

 

Project Description

Fungi cause the vast majority of plant diseases and result in enormous losses to agriculture worldwide every year. There is a continual need to develop safer, more effective ways to combat plant disease. Elucidating molecular mechanisms that regulate interactions between plants and fungi will be critical for future disease management. Complete genome sequences of pathogens and of their hosts have become a key part of this research effort.

C. graminicola is a hemibiotrophic plant pathogen, which has aspects of both biotrophy and necrotrophy. Comparitive studies of the genome of the model hemibiotroph C. graminicola with the genomes of these other classes may be very useful for elucidating functional and evolutionary relationships among these different pathogenicity types. The goal will be a High Quality Draft assembly using the whole genome shotgun approach.  The degree of coverage will be 8X. The assembly will be done using the ARACHNE program and the annotation with the Calhoun program at Broad.  The assembly will be independently validated by using an optical map, and the annotation will be aided by an EST project consisting of paired reads of 15,000 cDNA clones.  Data will be releaed to the public on the NCBI website and on the website of the Broad Institute.

Impact

To date we have completed the optical map of C. graminicola, which demonstrated that the genome was considerably larger than we had anticipated (approximately 57 Mb).  We have completed sequencing to 8X coverage of this larger genome size, and will soon begin the process of assembly.  Most of the sequence has already been released to the public on the NCBI trace repository.