e premte, janar 28, 2005

The Genome of the Basidiomycetous Yeast and Human Pathogen Cryptococcus Neoformans

Science, 14 Januar

Cryptococcus neoformans is a basidiomycetous yeast ubiquitous in the environment, a model for fungal pathogenesis and an opportunistic human pathogen of global importance. We have sequenced its ~20 Mb genome, which contains ~6500 intron-rich gene structures and encodes a transcriptome abundant in alternatively spliced and antisense messages. The genome is rich in transposons, many of which cluster at candidate centromeric regions. The presence of these transposons may drive karyotype instability and phenotypic variation. C. neoformans encodes unique genes that may contribute to its unusual virulence properties and comparison of two phenotypically distinct strains reveals variation in gene content in addition to sequence polymorphisms between the genomes.