G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics | 2021
Showcasing Fungal Genetics & Genomics with the Genetics Society of America
Abstract
The fungal kingdom is remarkable in its breadth and depth of impact on global health, agriculture, biodiversity, ecology, manufacturing, and biomedical research. With at least 6 million species, these eukaryotes exhibit astounding diversity at the level of genomes, morphologies, modes of reproduction, response to selection, environmental niches, and interactions with other organisms (Heitman et al. 2017). Emerging fungal infectious diseases in both animals and plants are occurring all over the world and are increasing as a proportion of disease alerts for all pathogens (Fisher et al. 2012). More than 200 fungal species are human-associated, either as commensals and members of our microbiome or as pathogens that cause lethal infectious diseases (Brown et al. 2012). With the global emergence and spread of fungal pathogens resistant to all current classes of antifungals, these organisms pose an acute threat to human health (Fisher et al. 2018). And the threat extends far beyond human health. We have witnessed an unprecedented number of fungal diseases causing extinctions of wild species in recent years, with devastating mortalities of amphibians and bats now threatening biodiversity (Fisher et al. 2020). Perhaps most widely recognized is the profound threat posed by fungi to food security worldwide, as fungi cause epidemics in staple crops that feed billions and produce toxins that contaminate food supplies and cause cancer (Fisher et al. 2020, 2018). Despite the many threats, fungi also provide phenomenal opportunities. Fungi are the earth’s pre-eminent degraders of organic matter, include the best-characterized eukaryotic genetic model systems, and have had a transformative impact on medicine as they synthesize an extraordinary diversity of secondary metabolites that have revolutionized patient care, including antibiotics, immunosuppressive drugs that inhibit transplant rejection, and drugs that reduce the risk of heart disease (Keller et al. 2005; Heitman et al. 2017). Fungi also produce enzymes crucial for fermentation, food production, bioremediation, and biofuel production (Heitman et al. 2017). Our challenge is to understand the facets of fungal biology that impart these varied properties, in order to develop new strategies to mitigate the threats posed by fungi and to harness their extraordinary potential, as well as to leverage the power of fungal genetics and genomics to uncover fundamental biological mechanisms. To showcase major advances in Fungal Genetics & Genomics, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) has launched a special collection of publications in the GSA Journals GENETICS and G3: Genesj Genomesj Genetics. We have been enlisted to serve as senior editors for this new series. The GSA has a long history of contributions supporting fungal genetics and geneticists as a community, both through publications in the GSA journals and through GSA co-sponsorship of the Asilomar Fungal Genetics meeting. This editorial accompanies 15 papers covering an exceptional breadth of topics in genetics and genomics that launch this initiative in the February 2021 issues of GENETICS and G3. One paper explores variation among biosynthetic gene clusters, secondary metabolite profiles, and virulence traits across Aspergillus species (Steenwyk et al. 2020). Another presents the development of a web tool for designing CRISPR/Cas9-driven genetic modifications in diverse populations (Stoneman et al. 2020). GENETICS features an analysis of the role of MAPK pheromone response signaling in prey sensing and response in a nematode-trapping fungus (Chen et al. 2020), and G3 features an analysis of signal-mediated localization of pheromone response pathway components in a human fungal pathogen (Costa et al. 2020). The initial block of papers in GENETICS includes a study that implicates repeated horizontal transfer of metabolism genes in violating Dollo’s law of irreversible loss (Haase et al. 2020), one that implicates parallel events of massive loss of heterozygosity in driving extreme diversification in the hybrid lineage of Candida albicans (Mix~ ao et al. 2020), one that dissects tolerance to oxidative stress in a fungal pathogen of wheat (Zhong et al. 2020), and one that illustrates a complex regulatory network governs methionine biosynthesis in C. albicans (Shrivastava et al. 2021). G3 includes a report of the genome sequence of the oyster mushroom Pleurotus ostreatus (Lee et al. 2020), further genomic analysis of two Italian oyster mushroom strains (de Ulzurrun et al. 2020), a forward genetic screen for mutants with defects in trap morphogenesis in the nematodetrapping fungus Arthrobotrys oligospora (Huang et al. 2020), an analysis of target engagement of the master regulator of fungal mating MAT1-1-1 in Aspergillus fumigatus (Ram sak et al. 2020), and a portrait of the global translational landscape accompanying a C. albicans morphological transition (Mundodi et al. 2020), a comparative genomic analysis that implicates an epigenetic mechanism of phenotypic switching in C. albicans (Beekman et al. 2021), as well as a genomic annotation pipeline that