bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/829465; this version posted November 4, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC 4.0 International license. 1 Recurrent loss of abaA, a master regulator of asexual development in filamentous fungi, 2 correlates with changes in genomic and morphological traits 3 4 Matthew E. Meada,*, Alexander T. Borowskya,b,*, Bastian Joehnkc, Jacob L. Steenwyka, Xing- 5 Xing Shena, Anita Silc, and Antonis Rokasa,# 6 7 aDepartment of Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA 8 bCurrent Address: Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California Riverside, 9 Riverside, California, USA 10 cDepartment of Microbiology and Immunology, University of California San Francisco, San 11 Francisco, California, USA 12 13 Short Title: Recurrent loss of abaA across Eurotiomycetes 14 #Address correspondence to Antonis Rokas,
[email protected] 15 16 *These authors contributed equally to this work 17 18 19 Keywords: Fungal asexual development, abaA, evolution, developmental evolution, 20 morphology, binding site, Histoplasma capsulatum, regulatory rewiring, gene regulatory 21 network, evo-devo 22 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/829465; this version posted November 4, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC 4.0 International license. 23 Abstract 24 Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) drive developmental and cellular differentiation, and variation 25 in their architectures gives rise to morphological diversity.