ARS | Publication request: Genomics of Industrial Aspergilli and Comparison with Toxigenic Relatives

Submitted to: Journal of Food Additives & Contaminants
Publication Type: Review Article
Publication Acceptance Date: September 15, 2007
Publication Date: September 9, 2008
Citation: Machida, M., Terabayshi, Y., Sano, M., Yamane, N., Tamano, K., Payne, G., Yu, J., Cleveland, T.E., Nierman, W.C. 2008. Genomics of Industrial Aspergilli and Comparison with Toxigenic Relatives. Journal of Food Additives & Contaminants. 25(9):1147-1151.

Technical Abstract: Aspergillus oryzae has been widely used in Japanese fermentation industries for longer than a thousand years. A. oryzae produces large amounts of various hydrolytic enzymes and has been successfully applied to modern biotechnology. The A. oryzae genome size (37.5 Mb) is very close to those of A. flavus and A. niger (Archer and Dyer, 2004), and 20-30% bigger than those of Aspergillus nidulans (Galagan et al., 2005) and Aspergillus fumigatus (Nierman et al., 2005). A. oryzae and A. flavus have exactly the same number of aspartic proteinase genes, each orthologous pair of which shares highly conserved amino acid sequence. Synteny analysis with A. fumigatus and A. nidulans showed that A. oryzae genome has a mosaic structure consisting of syntenic and non-syntenic blocks. The density of the genes having homologs in the microorganisms to be compared was obviously higher on the syntenic blocks than on the nonsyntenic ones. The expression analysis by the DNA microarray supported the significantly lower expression of the genes on the non-syntenic blocks than those on the syntenic blocks.