Pestalotiopsis Fici
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Wang et al. BMC Genomics (2015) 16:28 DOI 10.1186/s12864-014-1190-9 RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access Genomic and transcriptomic analysis of the endophytic fungus Pestalotiopsis fici reveals its lifestyle and high potential for synthesis of natural products Xiuna Wang1,2, Xiaoling Zhang1, Ling Liu1, Meichun Xiang1, Wenzhao Wang1, Xiang Sun1, Yongsheng Che3, Liangdong Guo1, Gang Liu1, Liyun Guo2, Chengshu Wang4, Wen-Bing Yin1, Marc Stadler5, Xinyu Zhang1* and Xingzhong Liu1* Abstract Background: In recent years, the genus Pestalotiopsis is receiving increasing attention, not only because of its economic impact as a plant pathogen but also as a commonly isolated endophyte which is an important source of bioactive natural products. Pestalotiopsis fici Steyaert W106-1/CGMCC3.15140 as an endophyte of tea produces numerous novel secondary metabolites, including chloropupukeananin, a derivative of chlorinated pupukeanane that is first discovered in fungi. Some of them might be important as the drug leads for future pharmaceutics. Results: Here, we report the genome sequence of the endophytic fungus of tea Pestalotiopsis fici W106-1/CGMCC3.15140. The abundant carbohydrate-active enzymes especially significantly expanding pectinases allow the fungus to utilize the limited intercellular nutrients within the host plants, suggesting adaptation of the fungus to endophytic lifestyle. The P. fici genome encodes a rich set of secondary metabolite synthesis genes, including 27 polyketide synthases (PKSs), 12 non-ribosomal peptide synthases (NRPSs), five dimethylallyl tryptophan synthases, four putative PKS-like enzymes, 15 putative NRPS-like enzymes, 15 terpenoid synthases, seven terpenoid cyclases, seven fatty-acid synthases, and five hybrids of PKS-NRPS. The majority of these core enzymes distributed into 74 secondary metabolite clusters. The putative Diels-Alderase genes have undergone expansion. Conclusion: The significant expansion of pectinase encoding genes provides essential insight in the life strategy of endophytes, and richness of gene clusters for secondary metabolites reveals high potential of natural products of endophytic fungi. Keywords: Genome, Endophyte, Pestalotiopsis fici, Secondary metabolite Background chemists due to their various novel and bioactive com- Endophytic fungi live within healthy plants without caus- pounds [3-7]. The functions of bioactive natural products ing any apparent symptoms of disease [1]. In natural eco- include antibiotics, anticancer agents, agrichemicals, and systems, endophytic fungi have been isolated from almost other bioactive compounds [5]. Some of them could be de- all plants studied so far. They confer abiotic and biotic veloped into leads for therapeutics, such as the well-known stress tolerance, increase biomass, and decrease water con- taxol [8]. In addition, fungal endophyte is also proposed to sumption of the host plant [2]. In recent years, they have be potential source of biocatalysts [9]. Endophytes as im- been received increasing attention from natural product portant biological resources are waiting to be exploited. The genus Pestalotiopsis (Xylariales, Ascomycota) in- * Correspondence: [email protected]; [email protected] cludes many widely distributed species, occurring on a 1State Key Laboratory of Mycology, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese wide range of substrata such as on living plants as path- Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China ogens and endophytes and on dead plant materials as Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © 2015 Wang et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Wang et al. BMC Genomics (2015) 16:28 Page 2 of 13 saprobes [10]. However, Pestalotiopsis spp. have been ex- respectively, in the living tea twigs without any disease tensively isolated from healthy plant tissues and consid- symptoms. ered as a main part of endophytes in the past decade [11-13]. The chemical investigations showed that Pesta- General genome features lotiopsis spp. are important resource for natural product The P. fici genome was assembled into 118 scaffolds discovery [14,15]. (24.5-fold coverage) with N50 of 4 Mb encompassing Pestalotiopsis fici Steyaert was first identified as a 52 Mb (Table 1). A total of 15,413 genes were predicted, pathogen of Ficus carica [16]. However, a strain of P. fici including 11,755 orthologous genes and 14,528 genes (W106-1/CGMCC3.15140) was isolated as endophyte containing at least one domain/motif (Additional file 1: from the branches of Camellia sinensis in Hangzhou, Figure S2). Among them, 494 genes were pseudogenes. China. Chemical investigations revealed that this strain Repetitive sequences, including 0.49% simple repeats, produces 88 secondary metabolites including 70 new 0.96% low complexity repeats, and 1.54% transposable ele- natural products [17]. Those include, for instance, pesta- ments(TEs),madeuponly2.97%ofthegenomeofP. fici. loficiols A-L and Q-S [18-20], pestalofones A-H [21,22], The TEs were identified, grouped, and annotated as class 1 pestalodiols A-D [22], chloropupukeananin which is the (LTR, LINE), class 2 (MITE, TIR) or unknown TEs using first chlorinated pupukeanane derivative discovered in the REPET pipeline and Repbase. The LTR group in class fungi [23], chloropestolides A-G with unprecedented 1 comprised of two families: Gypsy and Copia. RIPCAL spiroketal skeleton [24,25], chloropupukeanone A [26], analysis showed index values of 0.35 for (CpA+TpG)/TpA chloropupukeanolides A-E [26,27]. Those compounds and 0.42 for (CpT+ApG)/(TpT+ApA), which suggested have shown various bioactivities, including inhibition of heavy repeat-induced point mutation (RIP) in the P. fici HIV-1 replication, cytotoxicity against human tumor cell genome and that the RIP mutation was a classical pattern lines, and antifungal effects against Aspergillus fumigatus of CpA→TpA (Additional file 1: Figure S3). [18-22,24-27]. It has been hypothesized that the biosyn- One of the most novel characteristics of the P. fici thesis pathways for some of these secondary metabolites genome was that it contained more multigene families, include a Diels-Alder reaction, which is vital for the ob- compared with those of other reference ascomyceteous served abundance of secondary metabolites [17]. Although fungi in this study. The multigene families in the P. fici putative biosynthesis pathways of some secondary metab- genome are 2,047 that are similar to that in the genome olites are postulated, the actual biosynthetic pathways re- of the ectomycorrhizal basidiomycete, Laccaria bicolor main to be confirmed. However, access to the genes (Figure 2A and Additional file 1: Figure S4). The average involved in secondary metabolism has been greatly en- number of proteins per family in P. fici (3.29) was much hanced, as the putative genes encoding for biosynthesis of higher than in other Pezizomycotina species (2.46) but secondary metabolites can easily be detected by in silico was similar to the endophytic basidiomycete, Piriformos- analysis of genomic data [28-30]. pora indica (3.56) (Figure 2A). The P. fici genome, how- Both lifestyle and richness of secondary metabolites of ever, contained a large number of replicated gene pairs endophytic fungi have not been comprehensive under- with amino acid identities below 80% (Figure 2B). stood. In this study, the P. fici genome was sequenced and CAFÉ analysis revealed that 1,764 families had expanded annotated. The gene families encoding carbohydrate- in the P. fici genome (Figure 3), indicated a considerable active enzymes especially pectinases and transporters have protein family expansion. The number of expanded gene undergone expansion. A large set of genes involved in sec- family was significantly higher for P. fici than that of the ondary metabolism has been identified. The genomic in- reference fungi. Gene family expansion occurred in those formation provides insight on how the living strategy as genes encoding for cytochrome P450 monooxygenases endophyte and how the richness and diversity of second- (CYPs), heterokaryon incompatibility, major facilitator super- ary metabolites. family (MFS), short-chain dehydrogenase, tyrosinase, intra- diol ring-cleavage dioxygenase, methyltransferase type, and Results cysteine-rich fungal-specific extracellular EGF-like (CFEM) Tea branch colonization by Pestalotiopsis fici domain-containing protein (Additional file 1: Figure S5 Although P. fici was isolated as endophyte from the tea and Additional file 2: Table S2). The expanded gene fam- plant, the detailed knowledge about fungal colonization ilies of the P. fici genome seem to be mainly involved in strategy is unknown. The twigs of the tea tree were inoc- processes like secondary metabolism, pheromone response, ulated with fresh mycelium of the GFP transformant of detoxification, and virulence (Additional file 1: Figure S5). P. fici (GFP3-1) and the colonization pattern was docu- mented over a period of 21 days by confocal microscopy. Carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZymes) in P. fici A few hyphae were observed at seven (Figure 1) and Fungi can utilize monosaccharides or oligosaccharides,