Publications by authors named "Heeji Moon"
Article Synopsis
- Anaplerosis is when certain enzymes help replace important molecules in a cycle that produces energy in cells.
- The enzyme pyruvate carboxylase (PYC) is important for this process and helps create a molecule called oxaloacetate.
- Researchers found that deleting the PYC1 gene in two types of fungi had different effects; for one type, it hurt its growth and ability to cause disease, while the other type was mostly unaffected.
The fungal cell wall, primarily comprising a glucan-chitin matrix and cell wall proteins (CWPs), serves as a key mediator for fungal interactions with the environment and plays a pivotal role in virulence. In this study, we employed a comprehensive proteomics approach to analyze the CWPs in the plant pathogenic fungus . Our methodology successfully extracted and identified 1373 CWPs, highlighting their complex linkages, including noncovalent bonds, disulfide bridges, alkali-sensitive linkages, and glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchors.
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- * Thirteen essential genes, previously thought to be deleted, were confirmed as crucial for pathogen resistance using advanced genetic techniques like CRISPR and conditional mutants.
- * The study demonstrated that using double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) to silence these essential genes significantly reduced fungal disease lesions on barley leaves, indicating their potential as targets for disease control strategies.
Article Synopsis
- Oxidative bursts in plants help defend against pathogen infections by producing reactive oxygen species that kill pathogens and hinder their spread, but pathogens have adapted to tolerate this oxidative stress.
- The study analyzed the transcriptomes of six oxidative stress-sensitive strains of a plant pathogenic fungus to identify pathways related to stress responses, including DNA repair, autophagy, and ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis, uncovering key hub genes.
- Deletion or suppression of specific genes in the fungus increased sensitivity to oxidative stress, highlighting the importance of transcriptional elongation, DNA damage responses, and heme biosynthesis in both oxidative stress response and the pathogen's ability to infect plants.
Intron lariats excised during the splicing process are rapidly degraded by RNA lariat debranching enzyme (Dbr1) and several exonucleases. Rapid turnover of lariat RNA is essential to cellular RNA homeostasis. However, the functions of Dbr1 have not been investigated in filamentous fungi.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFusarium graminearum is an important plant-pathogenic fungus that causes Fusarium head blight on wheat and barley, and ear rot on maize worldwide. This fungus has been widely used as a model organism to study various biological processes of plant-pathogenic fungi because of its amenability to genetic manipulation and well-established outcross system. Gene deletion and overexpression/constitutive expression of target genes are tools widely used to investigate the molecular mechanism underlying fungal development, virulence, and secondary metabolite production.
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