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The End of the Whole Mess
Published in Sue Binkley, Biological Clocks, 2020
One organism that was actually launched into space is the fungus, Neurospora crassa. Neurospora is the bread mold that makes orange bands with a circadian rhythm. Race tubes were packaged in foam and sent aboard a space shuttle. When the cultures were re-examined upon their return to earth, rhythms with a period of about 22.7 hours were observed, so the freerunning rhythm persisted in space. The cultures were affected by the spaceflight, which involved large temperature changes and other disturbances, that were visibly different from the control cultures kept on terra firma. In the space tubes, there was greater variation in the growth rates among the space tubes, greater variance in the circadian period length, and the clarity of banding, which reflects the amplitude of the circadian rhythm, was reduced.175
Homology of Nonrepeated DNA Sequences in Phylogeny of Fungal Species
Published in S. K. Dutta, DNA Systematics, 2019
Single copy sequence homology between distantly related filamentous fungi representing three major classes (Phycomycetes, Ascomycetes, and Basidiomycetes) and two subclasses of Phycomycetes (Chytridiomycetes and Oomycetes) is shown in Table 1. Although these results do not give any precise information about phylogeny, they do give some measure of affinity between distantly related groups. The Ascomycete Neurospora has approximately 11% of sequences in common with the Phycomycete (Zygomycete) Mucor azygospora and 15% with Coprinus lagoupus. The Oomycete Saprolegnia ferax shares 44% of sequences with Neurospora crassa and 37% with the Chytridiomycete, Allomyces arbuscula. The intergeneric sequence homology between members of the same family Saprolegniaceae (5. ferax/A. radiosa) and Blastocladiaceae (A. arbuscula/Blastocladiella emersonii is 57 and 58%, respectively.
Barbara McClintock (1902–1992)
Published in Krishna Dronamraju, A Century of Geneticists, 2018
In 1944, she undertook a cytogenetic analysis of Neurospora crassa at the suggestion of George Beadle, who used the fungus to demonstrate the one gene–one enzyme relationship. He invited her to Stanford to undertake the study. She successfully described the number of chromosomes of N. crassa and described the entire life cycle of the species. Beadle said, “Barbara, in two months at Stanford, did more to clean up the cytology of Neurospora than all other cytological geneticists had done in all previous time on all forms of mold.” N. crassa has since become an ideal species for classical genetic analysis.
Immunosuppression in the Management of Presumed Non-infective Uveitis; Are We Sure What We are Treating? Notes on the Antimicrobial Properties of the Systemic Immunosuppressants
Published in Ocular Immunology and Inflammation, 2020
Ciclosporin A (CsA, cyclosporine) is a cyclic peptide originally isolated from a newly-discovered fungus (Tolypocladium inflatum) in 1971, during investigations at Sandoz into potential new antibiotics. Initially, CsA was found to be active only against Neurospora crassa (an Ascomycete mould, not known to be pathogenic in humans and coincidentally, widely used as a laboratory organism in fungal genetics studies) and Rhodotorula rubra,(an environmentally widespread Basidiomycete yeast which can be a human pathogen in the immunosuppressed). No antibacterial activity was discovered. However, later it was discovered that calcineurin is necessary for Cryptococcus neoformans metabolism at human body temperature, and subsequently that both CsA and FK506 were effective antifungals against this organism.16 It transpires that calcineurin inhibition is the mechanism of both T-cell immunosuppression and most antifungal activity.17 Ciclosporin is now also known to be active against Paracoccidioides brasiliensis in a murine model.18
LET dependence on killing effect and mutagenicity in the model filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa
Published in International Journal of Radiation Biology, 2018
Liqiu Ma, Yusuke Kazama, Tomonari Hirano, Ryouhei Morita, Shuuitsu Tanaka, Tomoko Abe, Shin Hatakeyama
We have previously reported about the cytotoxicity and mutagenesis induced by C-ion irradiation in the model filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa (Ma et al. 2013). Interestingly, the mutation types induced by C-ion in N. crassa were clearly different from those in budding yeast, even although these two organisms belong to the same phylum Ascomycota. We speculate that this difference may be owing to the repair system, HR or cNHEJ, whichever is functionally predominant in each organism. Contrary to that observed in yeast, where HR functions preferentially (Letavayova et al. 2006), both the repair systems equally act to process DSBs in Neurospora (Ninomiya et al. 2004; Ma et al. 2013). Based on these characteristics, information on mutagenesis in Neurospora may be helpful in breeding commercially important filamentous fungi, such as Aspergillus oryzae and Trichoderma sp., or for producing mutants of disease-inducing fungi for pathogenesis study.
Amyloid nomenclature 2022: update, novel proteins, and recommendations by the International Society of Amyloidosis (ISA) Nomenclature Committee
Published in Amyloid, 2022
Joel N. Buxbaum, Angela Dispenzieri, David S. Eisenberg, Marcus Fändrich, Giampaolo Merlini, Maria J. M. Saraiva, Yoshiki Sekijima, Per Westermark
In nature β-sheet fibrils are adapted for many functions. Certain polypeptide hormones are stored in β-sheet conformation, perhaps not as regular fibrils; melanin is bound to the β-sheet fibrillar carrier (p-mel17) in melanosomes. The strength of β-sheet fibrils is used by several bacterial and fungal organisms. Bacteria make several different structures, such as biofilms, that have β-sheet fibrillary compositions. The fungus Neurospora crassa expresses the hydrophobin EAS which forms amphipathic amyloid monolayers that facilitate spore formation and dispersal [5]. These are all examples of what we now accept as functional amyloid.