Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 280, Issue 1764, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.0862
Keywords
sexual dimorphism; Neurospora tetrasperma; gene expression
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Funding
- Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT)
- Sven and Lilly Lawski Foundation
- Swedish Research Council (VR)
- ARS [813310, ARS-0423014] Funding Source: Federal RePORTER
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In the filamentous ascomycete Neurospora tetrasperma, a large (approx. 7 Mbp) region of suppressed recombination surrounds the mating-type (mat) locus. While the remainder of the genome is largely homoallelic, this region of recombinational suppression, extending over 1500 genes, is associated with sequence divergence. Here, we used microarrays to examine how the molecular phenotype of gene expression level is linked to this divergent region, and thus to the mating type. Culturing N. tetrasperma on agar media that induce sexual/female or vegetative/male tissue, we found 196 genes significantly differentially expressed between mat A and mat a mating types. Our data show that the genes exhibiting mat-linked expression are enriched in the region genetically linked to mating type, and sequence and expression divergence are positively correlated. Our results indicate that the phenotype of mat A strains is optimized for traits promoting sexual/female development and the phenotype of mat a strains for vegetative/male development. This discovery of differentially expressed genes associated with mating type provides a link between genotypic and phenotypic divergence in this taxon and illustrates a fungal analogue to sexual dimorphism found among animals and plants.
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