Almeida et al. (1) have interrogated the genomes of two Pneumocystis species, Pneumocystis jirovecii and its sister Pneumocystis carinii, for genes known to be involved in sexual reproduction in the widely studied fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, with the hope that defining genetic pathways governing sexual reproduction in Pneumocystis will inform disease prevention strategies. Pneumocy...

ABSTRACT Dothistroma septosporum and D. pini are the two causal agents of Dothistroma needle blight of Pinus spp. in natural forests and plantations. Degenerate primers amplified portions of mating type genes (MAT1-1-1 and MAT1-2) and chromosome walking was applied to obtain the full-length genes in both species. The mating-type-specific primers designed in this study could distinguish between ...

Tetrahymena, a single-celled protist, is a eukaryote, just like you and me. But that’s about where the similarity ends. Each Tetrahymena cell contains not one, but two nuclei. The diploid germline nucleus remains transcriptionally silent throughout asexual reproduction, while the somatic nucleus is transcriptionally active. Most especially, Tetrahymena do sex differently from us—there are not t...

BACKGROUND Mating-type loci in yeasts and ascomycotan filamentous fungi (Pezizomycotina) encode master transcriptional factors that play a critical role in sexual development. Genome-wide analyses of mating-type-specification circuits and mating-type target genes are available in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Schizosaccharomyces pombe; however, no such analyses have been performed in heterothall...

Fungi of the Basidiomycota, representing major pathogen lineages and mushroom-forming species, exhibit diverse means to achieve sexual reproduction, with particularly varied mechanisms to determine compatibilities of haploid mating partners. For species that require mating between distinct genotypes, discrimination is usually based on both the reciprocal exchange of diffusible mating pheromones...

The sexual development and virulence of the fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans is controlled by a bipolar mating system determined by a single locus that exists in two alleles, alpha and a. The alpha and a mating-type alleles from two divergent varieties were cloned and sequenced. The C. neoformans mating-type locus is unique, spans >100 kb, and contains more than 20 genes. MAT-encoded pro...

Previous studies demonstrated that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was uniparentally transmitted in laboratory crosses of the pathogenic yeast Cryptococcus neoformans. To begin understanding the mechanisms, this study examined the potential role of the mating-type locus on mtDNA inheritance in C. neoformans. Using existing isogenic strains (JEC20 and JEC21) that differed only at the mating-type locus...

Tsong et al. characterize the role of mating type genes in Candida albicans and identify a new regulator of mating type and several mating type target genes. Comparison with Saccharomyces cerevisiae provides an in-depth view into the evolution of a well-characterized genetic regulatory circuit.