Dioszegia hungarica strain PDD-24b-2 grown on R2A plate at 17°C. Image Credit: Françoise Bringel

The genome of Dioszegia hungarica PDD-24b-2 was provided by Françoise Bringel. The JGI Fungal Annotation pipeline was used to predict genes and provide functional annotation.

The study of microbial metabolism on atmospheric chemistry has revealed that microorganisms may play a central role in carbon metabolism at night, whereas during the day, photochemistry is dominant (Vaïtilingom et al. 2010, 2013). Air-borne microbes are both a source (immigration) and a sink (emigration) for populations of the phyllosphere (aerial parts of plants) (Kinkel 1997). One representative member of the cloud microbiota, Dioszegia hungarica strain PDD-24b-2, has been isolated from cloud water collected at the summit of the puy-du-Dôme in France (Vaïtilingom et al. 2012). This widespread fungal taxon is found in various cold environments, such as snow and glacial meltwater rivers (de García et al. 2007), and associated with plants of Antarctica (Ferreira et al. 2019).  It is also part of the core fungal community of the wheat phyllosphere (Karlsson et al. 2017; Sapkota et al. 2017). D. hungarica has also been identified as one of the few ‘microbial hub taxon’ that links plant host and abiotic factors to plant microbiome variation (Agler et al. 2016).

Therefore, examining its genome will contribute to better understanding of the dynamics of fungal diversity found in climate change-relevant ecosystems (e.g. clouds, cold environments).  D. hungarica PDD-24b-2 entire genome (17 chromosomes) and mitochondrial genome have been sequenced.

References:

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