In its 18th March edition, Nature magazine published the article entitled 'Comparative genomics reveals mobile pathogenicity chromosomes in Fusarium ' in which researchers from the University of Cordoba have participated. Nature magazine holds the top position - as much for its Impact Factor as the new Eigenfactor Score - among all magazines indexed in the Science Citation Report.
Doctor Antonio Di Pietro and Doctor Carmen Ruiz Roldán from the group “Ingeniería Genética de Hongos” (Genetic Engineering of Fungus) in the genetics department of the University of Cordoba have participated in the project together with professors and researchers from the Broad Institute of Harvard University, USA, and the University of Amsterdam, Holland, as well as other universities and research centres in America, Europe and Asia.
The project compares the genomes of three types of Fusarium, one of the most impactive pathogenic fungi and microtoxin producers in the food and agriculture industry. One of these is Fusarium oxysporum, an organism that the group at UCO has been working with for over 15 years and which produces vascular wilt in numerous species of agricultural interest.
The article describes the presence of four additional chromosomes in Fusarium oxysporum that are absent in the other two species analysed. The genetic information encoded in the four chromosomes specific to Fusarium oxysporum included numerous genes related to pathogenesis. The chromosomes also present an evolutionary profile different to the rest of the genome, which indicates that they could have been acquired by horizontal gene transfer. This hypothesis is confirmed experimentally in the article and opens a new perspective regarding the evolution mechanisms of pathogenic fungi.