Comparative genome sequence analysis underscores mycoparasitism as the ancestral life style of Trichoderma

By C. Kubicek, A. Herrera-Estrella, V. Seidl‐Seiboth, Diego Martínez, Irina S Druzhinina, M. Thon, S. Zeilinger, S. Casas‐Flores, B. Horwitz, P. Mukherjee and 54 more. Genome Biology, 2011

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BackgroundMycoparasitism, a lifestyle where one fungus is parasitic on another fungus, has special relevance when the prey is a plant pathogen, providing a strategy for biological control of pests for plant protection. Probably, the most studied biocontrol agents are species of the genus Hypocrea/Trichoderma.ResultsHere we report an analysis of the genome sequences of the two biocontrol species Trichoderma atroviride (teleomorph Hypocrea atroviridis) and Trichoderma virens (formerly Gliocladium virens, teleomorph Hypocrea virens), and a comparison with Trichoderma reesei (teleomorph Hypocrea jecorina). These three Trichoderma species display a remarkable conservation of gene order (78 to 96%), and a lack of active mobile elements probably due to repeat-induced point mutation. Several gene families are expanded in the two mycoparasitic species relative to T. reesei or other ascomycetes, and are overrepresented in non-syntenic genome regions. A phylogenetic analysis shows that T. reesei and T. virens are derived relative to T. atroviride. The mycoparasitism-specific genes thus arose in a common Trichoderma ancestor but were subsequently lost in T. reesei.ConclusionsThe data offer a better understanding of mycoparasitism, and thus enforce the development of improved biocontrol strains for efficient and environmentally friendly protection of plants.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/55d661437f4eafd8bf8f9e1e8aadcb4935bfa4f8

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Citations in the corpus

Trichoderma spp. – application and prospects for use in organic farming and industry (2014, background): “reesei (Kubicek et al. 2011).”
Microbial Degradation of Lignocellulosic Biomass (2013, background): “reesei has five characterized EGLs, two highly expressed CBHs and two characterized BGLs, the latter being expressed at low levels [37, 38] reviewed in [33].”
Fueling the future with fungal genomics (2011, background): “viride IMI 206040 and Trichoderma virens Gv29-8 were sequenced recently (Kubicek et al. 2011).”
Abiotic Stress Responses and Microbe-Mediated Mitigation in Plants: The Omics Strategies (2017, background): “A putative sequence of ACC-deaminase found in Trichoderma genome was confirmed by gene silencing through RNAi (Viterbo et al., 2010; Kubicek et al., 2011).”
Trichoderma: the genomics of opportunistic success (2011, background): “Yet its gene inventory already comprises several amplified gene families that are beneficial for competition and antagonism (for detailed description see 5 ref.(13)) thus indicating a genetic predisposition for mycotrophy.”
A versatile toolkit for high throughput functional genomics with Trichoderma reesei (2012, background): “The increasing awareness of the limited availability of fossil fuels along with the environmental problems caused by their application initiated considerable research efforts towards clean and sustainable biofuels [1-3].”