Campus Units
Computer Science
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Published Version
Publication Date
2014
Journal or Book Title
PeerJ
Volume
2
First Page
e650
DOI
10.7717/peerj.650
Abstract
There are major gaps in the understanding of how genetic variation is generated in the asexual pathogen Verticillium dahliae. On the one hand, V. dahliae is a haploid organism that reproduces clonally. On the other hand, single-nucleotide polymorphisms and chromosomal rearrangements were found between V. dahliae strains. Lineage-specific (LS) regions comprising about 5% of the genome are highly variable between V. dahliae strains. Nonetheless, it is unknown whether horizontal gene transfer plays a major role in generating genetic variation in V. dahliae. Here, we analyzed a previously sequenced V. dahliae population of nine strains from various geographical locations and hosts. We found highly homologous elements in LS regions of each strain; LS regions of V. dahliae strain JR2 are much richer in highly homologous elements than the core genome. In addition, we discovered, in LS regions of JR2, several structural forms of nonhomologous recombination, and two or three homologous sequence types of each form, with almost each sequence type present in an LS region of another strain. A large section of one of the forms is known to be horizontally transferred between V. dahliae strains. We unexpectedly found that 350 kilobases of dynamic LS regions were much more conserved than the core genome between V. dahliae and a closely related species (V. albo-atrum), suggesting that these LS regions were horizontally transferred recently. Our results support the view that genetic variation in LS regions is generated by horizontal transfer between strains, and by chromosomal reshuffling reported previously.
Rights
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Copyright Owner
The Authors
Copyright Date
2014
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Huang, Xiaoqiu, "Horizontal transfer generates genetic variation in an asexual pathogen" (2014). Computer Science Publications. 4.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cs_pubs/4
Included in
Other Computer Sciences Commons, Plant Biology Commons, Plant Breeding and Genetics Commons
Comments
This is an article from PeerJ 2 (2014): e650, doi :10.7717/peerj.650. Posted with permission.