Publications by authors named "Jennifer Yuzon"

Ionizing radiation poses a significant threat to living organisms and human health, given its destructive nature and widespread use in fields such as medicine and the potential for nuclear disasters. Melanized fungi exhibit remarkable survival capabilities, enduring doses up to 1,000-fold higher than mammals. Through adaptive laboratory evolution, we validated the protective role of constitutive upregulation of DNA repair genes in the black yeast , enhancing survival after radiation exposure.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Agro-ecosystems provide environments that are conducive for rapid evolution and dispersal of plant pathogens. Previous studies have demonstrated that hybridization of crop pathogens can give rise to new lineages with altered virulence profiles. Currently, little is known about either the genetics of fungal pathogen hybridization or the mechanisms that may prevent hybridization between related species.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

It is commonly assumed that asexual lineages are short-lived evolutionarily, yet many asexual organisms can generate genetic and phenotypic variation, providing an avenue for further evolution. Previous work on the asexual plant pathogen NA1 revealed considerable genetic variation in the form of Structural Variants (SVs). To better understand how SVs arise and their significance to the California NA1 population, we studied the evolutionary histories of SVs and the forest conditions associated with their emergence.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The NA1 clonal lineage of is responsible for sudden oak death, an epidemic that has devastated California coastal forest ecosystems. An NA1 isolate, Pr102, derived from coast live oak in California, was previously sequenced and reported with a 65-Mb assembly containing 12 Mb of gaps in 2,576 scaffolds. Here, we report an improved 70-Mb genome in 1,512 scaffolds with 6,752 bp of gaps after incorporating PacBio P5-C3 long reads.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

is a destructive pathogen that causes sudden oak death disease. The genome sequence of isolate Pr102 was previously produced, using Sanger reads, and contained 12 Mb of gaps. However, isolate Pr102 had shown reduced aggressiveness and genome abnormalities.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Accumulating evidence suggests that genome plasticity allows filamentous plant pathogens to adapt to changing environments. Recently, the generalist plant pathogen Phytophthora ramorum has been documented to undergo irreversible phenotypic alterations accompanied by chromosomal aberrations when infecting trunks of mature oak trees (genus Quercus). In contrast, genomes and phenotypes of the pathogen derived from the foliage of California bay (Umbellularia californica) are usually stable.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Basidiomycete fungi subsist on various types of plant material in diverse environments, from living and dead trees and forest litter to crops and grasses and to decaying plant matter in soils. Due to the variation in their natural carbon sources, basidiomycetes have highly varied plant-polysaccharide-degrading capabilities. This topic is not as well studied for basidiomycetes as for ascomycete fungi, which are the main sources of knowledge on fungal plant polysaccharide degradation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF