Characterization and Comparative Analysis of the Genome of Puccinia sorghi Schwein, the Causal Agent of Maize Common Rust

BURGUENER, GERMÁN; ROCHI, LUCÍA

FUNGAL GENETICS AND BIOLOGY

ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2016

1087-1845

Rust fungi are one of the most devastating pathogens of crop plants. The biotrophic fungus Puccinia sorghi Schwein (Ps) is responsible for common rust, an endemic disease of maize (Zea mays L) in Argentina that causes significant yield losses in corn production. In spite of this, the Ps genomic sequence was not available. We used Illumina sequencing to rapidly access the 99.6 Mb draft genome sequence of Ps race RO10H11247, a single-uredinial isolate derived from infected maize leaves collected in the Argentine Corn Belt Region during 2010. High quality reads were obtained from 200 bp paired-end and 5000 bp mate-paired libraries and assembled in 15,722 scaffolds.Comparative studies with the three sequenced wheat rust fungus, and microsynteny analysis involving Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (Pst), support the quality achieved for the assembly. A pipeline which combined an ab initio program with homology-based models was used to identify 21,087 putative coding sequences, of which 1,596 might be39 part of the Ps RO10H11247 secretome. The results presented here show the effectiveness of the Illumina strategy for sequencing dikaryotic genomes of non-model organisms and provides reliable DNA sequence information for genomic studies, including pathogenic mechanisms of this maize fungus and molecular markers design.