In this study, the production of aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) and cyclopiazonic acid (CPA) was investigated in toxigenic and non-toxigenic Aspergillus flavus with respect to expression of aflR, veA and laeA genes that are involved to toxins production. A. flavus strains were cultured in YES broth at 28 °C for 4 days and the presence of (AFB1) and (CPA) was confirmed and measured by TLC and HPLC. The exp...

The Aspergillus nidulans putative mitogen-activated protein kinase encoded by mpkB has a role in natural product biosynthesis. An mpkB mutant exhibited a decrease in sterigmatocystin gene expression and low mycotoxin levels. The mutation also affected the expression of genes involved in penicillin and terrequinone A synthesis. mpkB was necessary for normal expression of laeA, which has been fou...

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 ...

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...

Trichoderma reesei is the industrial producer of cellulases and hemicellulases for biorefinery processes. Their expression is obligatorily dependent on the function of the protein methyltransferase LAE1. The Aspergillus nidulans orthologue of LAE1--LaeA--is part of the VELVET protein complex consisting of LaeA, VeA and VelB that regulates secondary metabolism and sexual as well as asexual repro...

Fungal secondary metabolites are important bioactive compounds but the conditions leading to expression of most of the putative secondary metabolism (SM) genes predicted by fungal genomics are unknown. Here we describe a novel mechanism involved in SM-gene regulation based on the finding that, in Aspergillus nidulans, mutants lacking components involved in heterochromatin formation show de-repr...