Filamentous fungi produce a diverse array of secondary metabolites (SMs) critical for defense, virulence, and communication. The metabolic pathways that produce SMs are found in contiguous gene clusters in fungal genomes, an atypical arrangement for metabolic pathways in other eukaryotes. Comparative studies of filamentous fungal species have shown that SM gene clusters are often either highly ...

Four kinds of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB)-degrading Rhodococcus sp. (TA421, TA431, HA99, and K37) have been isolated from termite ecosystem and under alkaline condition. The bph gene cluster involved in the degradation of PCB/biphenyl has been analyzed in strain TA421. This gene cluster was highly homologous to bph gene clusters in R. globerulus P6 and Rhodococcus sp. RHA1. In this study, we...

Microarray analysis of tiny amounts of RNA extracted from plant section samples prepared by laser microdissection (LM) can provide high-quality information on gene expression in specified plant cells at various stages of development. Having joined the LM-microarray analysis project, we utilized such genome-wide gene expression data from developing rice pollen cells to identify candidates for ci...

The afa gene clusters encode afimbrial adhesins (AFAs) that are expressed by uropathogenic and diarrhea-associated Escherichia coli strains. The plasmid-borne afa-3 gene cluster is responsible for the biosynthesis of the AFA-III adhesin that belongs to the Dr family of hemagglutinins. Reported in this work is the nucleotide sequence of the 9.2-kb insert of the recombinant plasmid pILL61, which ...

We identified five different putative wav gene cluster types, which are responsible for the synthesis of the core oligosaccharide (OS) region of Vibrio cholerae lipopolysaccharide. Preliminary evidence that the genes encoded by this cluster are involved in core OS biosynthesis came from analysis of the recently released O1 El Tor V. cholerae genome sequence and sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacryla...