Fungal genetics articles from across Nature Portfolio

The fungal pathogen Candida auris can acquire amphotericin B resistance through clinically rare mutations in sterol biosynthesis genes but at a certain fitness cost, which reduces its infection potential. Compensatory evolution can, however, mitigate this cost.

Genome editing-mediated large-scale engineering, which modified 13 genes involved in multiple metabolic pathways, enabled us to develop a versatile filamentous fungal host highly-producing heterologous natural products.

New molecular technologies have helped unveil facets of the genome beyond the canonical proteome, such as microproteins and short ORFs, products of alternative splicing, regulatory non-coding RNAs, transposable elements, and cis-regulatory DNA. In this Review, Gervais & Shapiro highlight what is known about this ‘hidden genome’ in fungi.

Quantitative trait loci mapping reveals that tolerance to host CO₂ is critical for virulence of the human fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans.

Development of a dual-fluorescent reporter system allows rapid quantification of diverse genomic copy number changes that arise in Candida albicans during adaptation to antifungal drugs.

In this Journal Club, Amelia Barber discusses a study revealing intraspecies heterogeneity in a fungal pathogen, prompting us to re-evaluate the notion of ‘reference’ strains.

A study in Science describes a rationally designed synthetic gene oscillator that prolongs the lifespan of yeast.

Identification and analysis of mutator strains in the human fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans show that natural loss of RNA interference triggers massive accumulation of Cnl1 retroelements at subtelomeric regions.

Computational analysis of fungal genomes revealed that some early-branching fungi use selenocysteine, the selenium-containing amino acid, that was thought to be missing from proteins in this lineage.