Fungal genomics articles from across Nature Portfolio

Analysis of 37 genomes together with more than 140 phenotypic traits links genomic features to ecological fitness and lifestyle diversity in Trichoderma fungi.

Accessory chromosomes are known to play roles in the evolution and virulence of ascomycetes, but are understudied in other groups of fungi. Here the authors sequence and analyse genomes of multiple isolates from a basidiomycete species, revealing substantial genomic variation and diverse core and accessory chromosome numbers.

Introgression shapes eukaryotic genomes, yet its prevalence in nature remains unclear. Sequencing 216 Neotropical S. cerevisiae genomes reveals that recurrent introgression is widespread and a major driver of lineage evolution within a structured population.

Large mobile genetic elements known as Starships act as vehicles for transferring transposable elements (TEs) between fungi. Here, Griem-Krey et al. show that these ‘hitchhiking’ TEs can drive rapid evolution through genome reshuffling, which can alter fungal pathogenicity.

Here, the authors present a bioinformatic pipeline to annotate lncRNA genes in Aspergillus fumigatus. The majority of these lncRNAs are only conserved at the species level, and their expression is highly responsive to antifungal exposure in Aspergillus fumigatus.

Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense tropical race 4 is threatening worldwide banana production. This study revealed a distinct evolutionary origin of tropical race 4 and how accessory genes and nitrosative pressure may have provided potential weaponries used by the pathogen to infect banana plants.

This study shows that healthy individuals are reservoirs for genotypically and phenotypically diverse Candida albicans strains that retain their capacity to cause disease.

This month’s Genome Watch highlights the genomic traits underlying the ancestral association between endobacteria, which live inside arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, which reside within plants.

This study reports that extensive copy number variations occur in the presence of azole antifungal drugs in Candida albicans, which might cause phenotypic and population-level heterogeneity observed in clinical isolates.

This study reports the discovery of human-pathogenic filamentous Aspergillus latus allodiploid hybrids that are phenotypically distinct from the parental species.

This month’s Genome Watch highlights a large-scale sequencing project that enriches our understanding of yeast evolution and diversity.