📣New year, new preprint @biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social 🎉! A study led by the brilliant @yukiyosato.bsky.social showing that Starship giant transposons dominate plastic genomic regions in the fungal plant pathogen Verticillium dahliae and drive virulence evolution. 🧵[1/12] doi.org/10.1101/2025... - ThreadSky

teamthomma.bsky.social • 50 days ago

📣New year, new preprint @biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social 🎉! A study led by the brilliant @yukiyosato.bsky.social showing that Starship giant transposons dominate plastic genomic regions in the fungal plant pathogen Verticillium dahliae and drive virulence evolution. 🧵[1/12] https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.08.631984

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spicybotrytis.bsky.social•49 days ago

Cool analysis. I wonder why some fungal pathogens show a strong two speed genome and others seem to have nothing like that. Botrytis seems to be a super stable one speed genome just with a ton of alleles per locus.

teamthomma.bsky.social•48 days ago

Maybe reflected by infection capability of species as a whole versus capability of individual strains? May be linked again to capability of strains to disperse?

spicybotrytis.bsky.social•48 days ago

Is Vert more locally structured?

teamthomma.bsky.social•47 days ago

Is a bit hard to say, as I do not think this has been thoroughly investigated, but the pathogen seems to spread mostly through human activity...carrying it around with plant material.

spicybotrytis.bsky.social•46 days ago

That could be a key difference. Botrytis has been found in the stratospheric jetstream and tons of recombination. If Botrytis has a massive Ne and migration, while Vert is lower Ne and low migration.

teamthomma.bsky.social•46 days ago

Exactly.

teamthomma.bsky.social•50 days ago

Starships are fungal giant transposons that are unique in their capacity to carry a wide range of cargo genes with diverse functions. Starships have long remained undiscovered and are still often overlooked. How abundant, dynamic, and important are they?
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tig.2024.08.006 [2/12]

teamthomma.bsky.social•50 days ago

In a collection of 56 high-quality Verticillium genome assemblies we identified Starships in nearly all strains. Many orphan tyrosine recombinase (YR) genes, a Starship hallmark, remain, suggesting many more overlooked Starships [3/12]

teamthomma.bsky.social•50 days ago

We previously showed that Verticillium dahliae strains show frequent large-scale genomic rearrangements. We now realize that many rearrangements disrupted Starships, complicating their detection. Thus, ‘Starships regions’ include both intact and fragmented Starships [4/12]

teamthomma.bsky.social•50 days ago

Surprise, surprise! Starships (red) make up most of the flexible regions (AGRs) of the 2-speed Verticillium genome and encode the well-known effectors Ave1 (https://rdcu.be/cby7M) and Av2 (https://shorturl.at/qzbu1). The remaining AGRs may be Starships we cannot unequivocally assign (in green) [5/12]

peiferlabunc.bsky.social•49 days ago

Please tell me more about "AGRs" and the 2-speed genome--what do these mean?

teamthomma.bsky.social•47 days ago

Many pathogens have compartmentalized (2-speed) genomes; household genes in core/conserved gene-dense areas and infection-related genes in plastic and TE-rich regions. In Verticillium these plastic regions are called AGRs, for adaptive genomic regions https://elifesciences.org/articles/62208

teamthomma.bsky.social•50 days ago

Unsurprising, Starships display typical features of plastic genomic regions [6/12]

teamthomma.bsky.social•50 days ago

Starships were shown to transfer horizontally; we see that too! Also the extremely large (0.5 Mb) Starship with Ave1 has moved between Verticillium species [7/12]

amarques.bsky.social•49 days ago

Congratulations 🎉

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