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Fungal Genetics Conference XXII Asilomar, California, US: 18-23 March 2003.
Now there are times when being a PhD student working on an obligate biotroph is not the most enviable of occupations, where the thought of a happy Petri dish full of fungus is but a distant dream. However, whilst cycling the 17-mile coastal drive on the beautiful Monterey peninsular, through the quiet and colourful Pacific Grove and past the glorious dunes and rocks of Asilomar State Beach, I felt that perhaps finally things were coming together in a most satisfactory way. Happily, the scenery was just the first of the attractions that Asilomar had waiting for me.
The 22nd fungal genetics conference was a first-rate combination of a good number of talks highly relevant to my project, and presentations that confronted me with subjects my past experience had hardly touched upon. This was exemplified by the first day of talks where the morning plenary session explored cell biology, including an interesting look at nuclear migration using beautiful time-lapse images of Aspergillus nidulans from Reinhard Fischer. Nuclei migrate towards growing tips of hyphae in a complicated way, and his group has found that a kinesin contributes to the accumulation of the motor dynein at the hyphal tip and thus influences the migration process. Subsequently the afternoon workshop on fungal stress responses was of great interest, being of direct relevance to my work and allowing me to at last put faces to names on papers. Here Wilhelm Hansberg presented results from analysis of catalase mutants in Neurospora crassa to support the idea that microbial cell differentiation is a response to a hyperoxidant state. Then Paul Tudzynski turned the attention to plant pathogens to ask if fungal reactive oxygen scavenging systems are essential for pathogenesis. He used the two very different examples of Botrytis cinerea and Claviceps purpurea to illustrate two different strategies of pathogens encountering an oxidative burst from the host plant. Firstly, necrotrophic Botrytis appears to contribute to the burst, and its pathogenicity is affected by removal of an active oxygen species-generating system. Conversely he put forward evidence that the biotroph Claviceps attempts to combat an oxidative burst from rye by secreting AOS-scavenging enzymes.
The plenary session of the second day of talks was dedicated to fungal-host interactions and a number of interesting areas of research were presented. Marc-Henri Lebrun discussed the possibility of infection-specific regulatory networks in Magnaporthe grisea and other fungal species. Regine Kahmann spoke about exploiting the annotation of the Ustilago maydis genomic sequence using micro array analysis.
Another useful part of the conference was report of emerging new techniques and resources. A number of posters presented work on gene silencing, with Pierre de Wit s group giving evidence of the usefulness of the technique in determination of virulence functions in Cladosporium fulvum and Jin-Rong Xu s group demonstrating success in Magnaporthe. A whole concurrent session was dedicated to genomics, including a report from the Whitehead institute. The theme was continued by Gillian Turgeon in the final morning s session, speaking about comparative genomics of plant pathogenic fungi made possible by the complete genome sequences now accessible. She and co-workers have used both phylogenomic and functional strategies to compare gene families involved in primary and secondary metabolism in fungi with differing pathogenic lifestyles. Their work on histidine kinases suggests groupings of genes into those required for basic functions common to all ascomycetes, whether pathogenic or not, and others which may be attuned to particular pathogenic niches.
The final evening gave us Hans Van Etten s entertainingly sick view of fungi and his apparently infamous hat that was well worn on the dance floor into the early hours. I am very grateful to the BSPP for making my attendance at this conference possible. The contingent from my lab wasn t huge but meant that I spoke to more new people at each meal and poster session and came away feeling that I had interacted successfully with the international fungal community.
C. Henderson
