Identification of Potential Septobasidium cavarae Virulence Factors through Comparative Genomic Analysis
Data supplied by Dr Daniel Henk
Project carried out by Jade Allum and Jessica Kan
Contributers Jack Clark and Maliha Hakim (BUSCO)
Property of the University of Bath
Pucciniomycotina is a subdivision of fungi and are predominantly plant pathogens. Septobasidium is a genus within Pucciniomycetes that is unique because it is a mutualistic symbiote of scale insects. Septobasidium cavarae is one of the 180 known Septobasidium species. This study investigated the S. cavarae genome by comparisons with other fungi. First, BUSCO was used to assess the completeness of the assembly data. The assembly was composed of 282 contigs and gave a genome size of 25.1 Mb. As the BUSCO complete score was 88.95%, the genome was suggested to be good and reliable. Next, the proteome was compared against close relative Puccinia graminis, distant relative Saccharomyces cerevisiae, plant-infecting fungi, and insect-infecting fungi using OrthoVenn2. From the comparison against plant-infecting fungi, 1838 core clusters and 297 S. cavarae unique clusters were identified. From the comparison against insect-infecting fungi, there were 1655 core clusters with 55 clusters shared between insect-infecting fungi, and 304 unique to S. cavarae. There was gene ontology enrichment of proteins involved in molybdopterin cofactor biosynthetic process, fatty acid metabolic process, and oxidoreductase activity. Some of these proteins identified could be potential virulence factors that contribute towards insect infectivity. Mechanisms include potential involvement in insect cuticle degradation, host immune defence evasion, hypothetical volatile organic compound production, and enhanced metabolism.