Journal of Fungi Article Seven Years at High Salinity—Experimental Evolution of the Extremely Halotolerant Black Yeast Hortaea werneckii Cene Gostinˇcar 1,* , Jason E. Stajich 2 , Anja Kejžar 3, Sunita Sinha 4, Corey Nislow 4, Metka Lenassi 3,† and Nina Gunde-Cimerman 1,† 1 Department of Biology, Biotechnical Faculty, University of Ljubljana, Jamnikarjeva 101, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia;
[email protected] 2 Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, Institute for Integrative Genome Biology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA;
[email protected] 3 Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana, Vrazov trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia;
[email protected] (A.K.);
[email protected] (M.L.) 4 Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3, Canada;
[email protected] (S.S.);
[email protected] (C.N.) * Correspondence:
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[email protected]; Tel.: +386-1-3203405 † These authors contributed equally to this work as senior authors. Abstract: The experimental evolution of microorganisms exposed to extreme conditions can provide insight into cellular adaptation to stress. Typically, stress-sensitive species are exposed to stress over many generations and then examined for improvements in their stress tolerance. In contrast, when starting with an already stress-tolerant progenitor there may be less room for further improvement, it may still be able to tweak its cellular machinery to increase extremotolerance, perhaps at the cost of poorer performance under non-extreme conditions. To investigate these possibilities, a strain of Citation: Gostinˇcar, C.; Stajich, J.E.; extremely halotolerant black yeast Hortaea werneckii was grown for over seven years through at least Kejžar, A.; Sinha, S.; Nislow, C.; 800 generations in a medium containing 4.3 M NaCl.