The methylotrophic yeast Komagataella phaffii (Pichia pastoris) is homothallic and has been reported to switch mating type by an ancient inversion mechanism. Two mating-type (MAT) loci include homologs of the MATa and MATα transcription factor genes, with the expression from one locus downregulated by telomere position effects. However, not much is known about mating gene regulation, since the ...

Vegetative growth rate, and size of sporangia, chlamydospores and oospores from 94 P. ramorum isolates were measured and the isolates were paired in vitro with four different heterothallic Phytophthora species isolated from infected nursery plants in Germany. P. ramorum isolates originated from different European countries and from Canada and the USA. 66 of the 67 European isolates were determi...

Mating-type switching in Schizosaccharomyces pombe involves replacing genetic information at the expressed mat1 locus with sequences copied from one of two silent donor loci, mat2-P or mat3-M, located within a 20-kb heterochromatic domain. Donor selection is dictated by cell type: mat2 is the preferred donor in M cells, and mat3 is the preferred donor in P cells. Here we show that a recombinati...

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...