Analysis of expressed sequence tags derived from the endophytic fungus Neotyphodium lolii grown in vitro and in association with its host plant perennial ryegrass

Abstract

As a first step towards a functional genomics approach to gain a greater understanding of this important symbiosis, we have generated, sequenced and analysed two EST libraries from cultures of N. lolii and six in planta subtracted EST libraries enriched for differentially expressed genes. A total of 12871 ESTs were sequenced which, after filtering for quality, clustered into 1066 contigs and 3230 singletons to give a set of 4296 unique sequences or unigenes. BLASTX analysis revealed that 60% of fungal sequences derived from cultures were of unknown function with a sub-set of these corresponding to orphans. For the in planta-derived ESTs, most of the sequences with homologs in the public databases (98%) were of ryegrass origin. Comparisons made against fully sequenced genomes revealed that most fungal ESTs were homologous to genes present in both pathogenic and non-pathogenic ascomycete filamentous fungi, whereas the subtracted libraries comprised mostly plant genes. A range of sequences having significant homology to demonstrated pathogenicity/virulence genes in other fungal pathosystems were also identified, as well as some ESTs with proven roles in endophyte secondary metabolism. Keywords: ESTs, cDNA, Neotyphodium lolii, Lolium perenne, symbiosis, mutualism, suppression subtractive hybridisation