Taxol and β-tubulins from endophytic fungi isolated from the Himalayan Yew, Zucc.

Paclitaxel, better known as the anticancer drug Taxol, has been isolated from several plant species and has been shown to be produced by fungi, actinomycetes, and even bacteria isolated from marine macroalgae. Given its cytostatic effect, studies conducted in the 1990's showed that paclitaxel was toxic to many pathogenic fungi and oomycetes. Further studies led to the idea that the differences in paclitaxel sensitivity exhibited by different fungi were due to differences in the β-tubulin protein sequence.

Comparative in silico analysis of EST-SSRs in angiosperm and gymnosperm tree genera.

Background: Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs) derived from Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) belong to the expressed fraction of the genome and are important for gene regulation, recombination, DNA replication, cell cycle and mismatch repair. Here, we present a comparative analysis of the SSR motif distribution in the 5'UTR, ORF and 3'UTR fractions of ESTs across selected genera of woody trees representing gymnosperms (17 species from seven genera) and angiosperms (40 species from eight genera).

Results: Our analysis supports a modest contribution of EST-SSR length to genome size in gymnosperms, while EST-SSR density was not associated with genome size in neither angiosperms nor gymnosperms.