| Abstract Detail
Mycology McDonald, Tami [1]. Inventory of transporters from the lichen Peltigera aphthosa. Most lichenizing fungi in the genus Peltigera are symbiotic with the cyanobacterium Nostoc as the sole photobiont, or photosynthetic partner. However, a few members of the genus partner with not one but two photobionts. In these tripartite lichens, the green alga Coccomyxa is the primary photobiont in the thallus and is responsible for the fixation of CO2, which is hypothesized to be transferred to the fungus as a sugar alcohol. Nostoc is a secondary photobiont that is sequestered in wart-like structures called cephalodia where nitrogen fixation takes place. The nutrient exchange between the fungus and each of these photobionts is thus spatially separated in the lichen thallus. These nutrient exchanges requires an efflux step and an import step, which are mediated by distinct transporter proteins. In order to characterize the "transportome" of the tripartite lichen Peltigera aphthosa, genome and transcriptome data were employed to identify the transporters mediating the exchange of sugar and sugar alcohols, ammonium, amino acids, and other potential symbiotically exchanged substrates. Multiple members of each type of transporter family were identified in the genomes of each of the symbionts. Some of these transporters were cloned and characterized in heterologous systems, including yeast and Xenopus oocytes. Additional yeast mutants engineered to metabolize specialized substrates such as sugar alcohols are required to fully characterize the symbiotically relevant transporters. Heterologous expression of transporters is a powerful method for investigating how nutrients are exchanged between the fungus and each of its photobiont partners in a largely genetically intractable system.
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1 - St. Catherine University, 2004 Randolph Ave, St. Paul, MN, 55105, United States
Keywords:
Lichens
fungi
Algae
Transporters
symbiosis
Genome
Transcriptome
Mycology.
Presentation Type: Oral Paper
Session: MY4, Mycology: Endophytes, Communities, Hydrophobins, and Transporters
Location: /
Date: Wednesday, July 21st, 2021
Time: 12:45 PM(EDT)
Number: MY4002
Abstract ID:1026
Candidate for Awards:None |
