The genome sequence of the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa

Nature, Vol. 422, pp. 859-868

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The genome sequence of the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa

James E. Galagan*, Sarah E. Calvo, Katherine A. Borkovich, Eric U. Selker, Nick D. Read, David Jaffe, William FitzHugh, Li-Jun Ma, Serge Smirnov, Seth Purcell, Bushra Rehman, Timothy Elkins, Reinhard Engels, Shunguang Wang, Cydney B. Nielsen, Jonathan Butler, Matthew Endrizzi, Dayong Qui, Peter Ianakiev, Deborah Bell-Pedersen, Mary Anne Nelson, Margaret Werner-Washburne, Claude P. Selitrennikoff, John A. Kinsey, Edward L. Braun, Alex Zelter, Ulrich Schulte, Gregory O. Kothe, Gregory Jedd, Werner Mewes, Chuck Staben, Edward Marcotte, David Greenberg, Alice Roy, Karen Foley, Jerome Naylor, Nicole Stange-Thomann, Robert Barrett, Sante Gnerre, Michael Kamal, Manolis Kamvysselis, Evan Mauceli, Cord Bielke, Stephen Rudd, Dmitrij Frishman,Svetlana Krystofova, Carolyn Rasmussen, Robert L. Metzenberg, David D. Perkins, Scott Kroken, Carlo Cogoni, Giuseppe Macino, David Catcheside, Weixi Li, Robert J. Pratt, Stephen A. Osmani, Colin P. C. DeSouza, Louise Glass, Marc J. Orbach, J. Andrew Berglund, Rodger Voelker, Oded Yarden, Michael Plamann, Stephan Seiler, Jay Dunlap, Alan Radford, Rodolfo Aramayo, Donald O. Natvig, Lisa A. Alex, Gertrud Mannhaupt, Daniel J. Ebbole, Michael Freitag, Ian Paulsen, Matthew S. Sachs, Eric S. Lander, Chad Nusbaum, and Bruce Birren*

The full list of author affiliations is available from the journal web site. Sequencing of the Neurospora crassa genome was conducted by the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research and the WICGR database for Neurospora is available here.

Neurospora crassa, is a central organism in the history of twentieth-century genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology. Here, we report a high-quality draft sequence of the N. crassa genome. The approximately 40-megabase genome encodes about 10,000 protein-codinggenes‹more than twice as many as in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe and only about 25% fewer than in the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster. Analysis of the gene set yields insights into unexpected aspects of Neurospora biology including the identification of genes potentially associated with red light photobiology, genes implicated in secondary metabolism, and important differences in Ca2+ signalling as compared with plants and animals. Neurospora possesses the widest array of genome defence mechanisms known for any eukaryotic organism, including a process unique to fungi called repeat-induced point mutation (RIP). Genome analysis suggests that RIP has had a profound impact on genome evolution, greatly slowing the creation of new genes through genomic duplication and resulting in a genome with an unusually low proportion of closely related genes.


This work was supported by the National Science Foundation with additional funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, The Israel Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health

* Corresponding authors