Abstract

Magnaporthe grisea is the most destructive pathogen of rice worldwide and the principal model organism for elucidating the molecular basis of fungal disease of plants. Here, we report the draft sequence of the M. grisea genome. Analysis of the gene set provides an insight into the adaptations required by a fungus to cause disease. The genome encodes a large and diverse set of secreted proteins, including those defined by unusual carbohydrate-binding domains. This fungus also possesses an expanded family of G-protein-coupled receptors, several new virulence-associated genes and large suites of enzymes involved in secondary metabolism. Consistent with a role in fungal pathogenesis, the expression of several of these genes is upregulated during the early stages of infection-related development. The M. grisea genome has been subject to invasion and proliferation of active transposable elements, reflecting the clonal nature of this fungus imposed by widespread rice cultivation.

1. Center for Integrated Fungal Research, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695, USA
2. School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, University of Exeter, Washington Singer Laboratories, Exeter EX4 4QG, UK
3. Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA
4. Department of Plant Pathology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40546, USA
5. Department of Plant Pathology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA
6. Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA
7. Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JH, UK
8. School of Agricultural Biotechnology, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-742, Korea
9. FRE2579 CNRS-Bayer, Bayer Cropscience, 69263 Lyon Cedex 09, France
10. Agilent Technologies, Wilmington, Delaware 19808, USA
11. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02141, USA
12. *Present address: RTI International, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709, USA

Correspondence to: Ralph A. Dean¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to R.A.D. (Email: Ralph_Dean@ncsu.edu). The whole-genome shotgun data has been deposited at GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ under the project accession number AACU00000000.

Received 4 November 2004; Accepted 7 February 2005

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