Sordaria macrospora is a filamentous ascomycete that is used as a model organism for the analysis
of fungal development and meiosis (the sexual propagation of eukaryotes). To gain more insights into the biology
of this fungus, we have sequenced the genome of S. macrospora in an international cooperation of researchers
from four different countries.
The genome was assembled from ~96 million reads (~95 million paired-end Solexa reads and 1 million 454 reads).
In two follow-up studies, we have improved the assembly through re-sequencing of the wild type and reducing the number of
scaffolds in the assembly, and have improved the annotation by modeling untranslated regions based on RNA-seq data.
The following table gives a summary of key features of the S. macrospora genome.
genome size
39.8 Mb
chromosomes
7
number of scaffolds (v03)
584
protein coding genes (v03)
9869
transcript from protein-coding genes (v03)
10014
More information is available in the following publications:
Nowrousian M, Stajich JE, Chu M, Engh I, Espagne E, Halliday K, Kamerewerd J, Kempken F, Knab B, Kuo HC, Osiewacz HD,
Pöggeler S, Read ND, Seiler S, Smith KM, Zickler D, Kück U, Freitag M (2010) De novo assembly of a 40 Mb
eukaryotic genome from short sequence reads: Sordaria macrospora, a model organism for fungal morphogenesis.
PLoS Genet 6(4): e1000891.
Paper at PLoS Geneticspdf
Nowrousian M, Teichert I, Masloff S, Kück U (2012) Whole-genome sequencing of Sordaria macrospora mutants identifies
developmental genes. G3 (Bethesda) 2: 261-270 Paper at G3pdf
Teichert I, Wolff G, Kück U, Nowrousian M (2012) Combining laser microdissection and RNA-seq to chart the transcriptional
landscape of fungal development. BMC Genomics 13: 511 Paper at BMC Genomicspdf
Blank-Landeshammer B, Teichert I, Märker R, Nowrousian M, Kück U, Sickmann A (2019) Combination of proteogenomics with peptide de novo sequencing identifies new genes and hidden posttranscriptional modifications. mBio 10: e02367-19 Paper at mBio