Both social and engineering factors must be further explored and scrutinized across the globe—as should notions of justice related to flooding impacts and responses.
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Edited by Rodney B. Croteau, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, and approved December 27, 2010 (received for review August 2, 2010)
Abstract
In western North America, the current outbreak of the mountain pine beetle (MPB) and its microbial associates has destroyed wide areas of lodgepole pine forest, including more than 16 million hectares in British Columbia. Grosmannia clavigera (Gc), a critical component of the outbreak, is a symbiont of the MPB and a pathogen of pine trees. To better understand the interactions between Gc, MPB, and lodgepole pine hosts, we sequenced the ∼30-Mb Gc genome and assembled it into 18 supercontigs. We predict 8,314 protein-coding genes, and support the gene models with proteome, expressed sequence tag, and RNA-seq data. We establish that Gc is heterothallic, and report evidence for repeat-induced point mutation. We report insights, from genome and transcriptome analyses, into how Gc tolerates conifer-defense chemicals, including oleoresin terpenoids, as they colonize a host tree. RNA-seq data indicate that terpenoids induce a substantial antimicrobial stress in Gc, and suggest that the fungus may detoxify these chemicals by using them as a carbon source. Terpenoid treatment strongly activated a ∼100-kb region of the Gc genome that contains a set of genes that may be important for detoxification of these host-defense chemicals. This work is a major step toward understanding the biological interactions between the tripartite MPB/fungus/forest system.
Footnotes
- 1To whom correspondence may be addressed. E-mail: bohlmann{at}interchange.ubc.ca or colette.breuil{at}ubc.ca.
Author contributions: S.D., S.J.M.J., J.B., and C.B. designed research; S.D., Y.W., N.Y.L., G.T., P.T., S.K.C., U.H.-O., S.M.A., and R.T.D. performed research; R.A.H., M.A.M., M.H., R.C.H., and S.J.M.J. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; S.D., A.L., B.H., N.F., U.H.-O., C.K.M.T., S.H., and I.B. analyzed data; and S.D., G.R., S.J.M.J., J.B., and C.B. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Data deposition: The sequences reported in this paper have been deposited in NCBI GenBank as assembly and annotations accession ACXQ00000000.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1011289108/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
Genome and transcriptome analyses of the mountain pine beetle-fungal symbiont Grosmannia clavigera, a lodgepole pine pathogen
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- rRNA Pseudogenes in Filamentous Ascomycetes as Revealed by Genome Data
- Unequal Recombination and Evolution of the Mating-Type (MAT) Loci in the Pathogenic Fungus Grosmannia clavigera and Relatives
- The Bark-Beetle-Associated Fungus, Endoconidiophora polonica, Utilizes the Phenolic Defense Compounds of Its Host as a Carbon Source
- Extracellular electron transfer systems fuel cellulose oxidative degradation
- Gene Discovery for Enzymes Involved in Limonene Modification or Utilization by the Mountain Pine Beetle-Associated Pathogen Grosmannia clavigera
- A Common Fungal Associate of the Spruce Bark Beetle Metabolizes the Stilbene Defenses of Norway Spruce
- Temperature-driven range expansion of an irruptive insect heightened by weakly coevolved plant defenses
- Evolution of Conifer Diterpene Synthases: Diterpene Resin Acid Biosynthesis in Lodgepole Pine and Jack Pine Involves Monofunctional and Bifunctional Diterpene Synthases
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