Aspergillus fumigatus is the causative agent of invasive aspergillosis, leading to infection-related mortality in immunocompromised patients. We previously showed that the conserved and unique-to-fungi veA gene affects different cell processes such as morphological development, gliotoxin biosynthesis and protease activity, suggesting a global regulatory effect on the genome of this medically re...

The Aspergillus nidulans rcoADelta mutant exhibits growth and developmental defects. We show that the rcoADelta mutant lacks cleistothecia and is self-sterile. In crosses with wild-type strains, rcoADelta nuclei do not contribute to the cleistothecial walls. Furthermore, sexual development resulting from veA overexpression is rcoA dependent, indicating that rcoA lies downstream of veA in the se...

Sensing and responding to environmental cues is critical to the lifestyle of filamentous fungi. How environmental variation influences fungi to produce a wide diversity of ecologically important secondary metabolites (SMs) is not well understood. To address this question, we first examined changes in global gene expression of the opportunistic human pathogen, Aspergillus fumigatus, after exposu...

We propose the vorticity expansion approximation VEA formulas of the exchange and correlation energy functionals of the current density functional theory CDFT . They have a form of the second-order expansion with respect to the vorticity. Expansion coefficients are determined by requiring them to satisfy exact relations that have been derived from scaling properties of exchange and correlation ...

Fungal secondary metabolism has become an important research topic with great biomedical and biotechnological value. In the postgenomic era, understanding the diversity and the molecular control of secondary metabolites (SMs) are two challenging tasks addressed by the research community. Discovery of the LaeA methyltransferase 10 years ago opened up a new horizon on the control of SM research w...

Secondary metabolism in the model fungus Aspergillus nidulans is controlled by the conserved global regulator VeA, which also governs morphological differentiation. Among the secondary metabolites regulated by VeA is the mycotoxin sterigmatocystin (ST). The presence of VeA is necessary for the biosynthesis of this carcinogenic compound. We identified a revertant mutant able to synthesize ST int...

The velvet gene, veA, co-ordinates asexual and sexual development in the homothallic fungal species Aspergillus nidulans. Studies in Aspergillus parasiticus and Aspergillus fumigatus demonstrated that veA also regulates morphological differentiation in these species. Whether veA has the same role in morphogenesis in other fungal genera has not been investigated. In this work, we studied the rol...

Fungi produce an astonishing variety of secondary metabolites, some of which belong to the most toxic compounds in the living world. Several fungal metabolites have anti-insecticidal properties which may yield advantages to the fungus in competition with insects for exploitation of environmental resources. Using the Drosophila melanogaster/Aspergillus nidulans ecological model system to assess ...

In this study we use data envelopment analysis (DEA), and an extension of DEA called value efficiency analysis (VEA), to explore the “production” of quality of life within counties in the mid-Atlantic region and the extent to which production frontiers and efficiency differ between rural and urban counties. These methods allow us to identify counties that are inefficient in their quality of lif...

Tympanometric measures were obtained in 1240 adults (2147 ears) ranging in age from 48 to 90 years. All subjects reported a negative history of otic disease, passed an otoscopic examination, and did not present a significant air-bone gap based on pure-tone audiometry. Relative to findings for younger adults, tympanometric measures for older adults in the present study showed greater variability...