Aspergillus

Asperfest 7 will begin on the evening of March 28, 2010 the next day. It will be at the NH Conference Centre Leeuwenhorst in The Netherlands immediately before ECFG 10. The meeting will feature a variety of the best work in Aspergillus species.

Gerhard Braus and Gustavo Goldman are the meeting Chairs.

More information online at: http://www.ecfg10.info/.

Students: This year students have a special reduced registration rate thanks to the generosity of Steve Osmani and Gustavo Goldman who donated royalties from their Aspergillus book for student support.
We will also have student poster prizes again, so be sure to submit a poster abstract.

New Investigators: We will have a session this year featuring new investigators. If you have been an assistant professor or equivalent with your own group for 6 years or less, please email me at aspergillus@plantbio.uga.edu with a tentative title and a brief description of your work (2-4 sentences).

Programs from Asperfest-6 and other Aspergillus meetings can be found on our homepage. (http://www.fgsc.net/Aspergillus/asperghome.html).

Check out the new FGSC Strain and Plasmid catalog interfaces.

The 2009 Aspergillus Bibliography is now available online as part of Fungal Genetics Reports, 56.

1/4/10

We (David Denning, Bill Nierman and Natalie Fedorova) are about to launch the NIAID Genome Sequencing Center Contract project which we have titled “Community Resources for Aspergillus fumigatus.” The project will be accomplished over a two year period and we welcome your suggestions regarding possible future publications, story lines, focus, and associated analyses as well as specific genes or pathway that will be chosen for extensive manual annotation.

The project will have three components.

Component 1 is to sequence to high quality two additional reference genomes. These additional genomes will be AF10 and AF210 (both US strains from my time in the Stevens lab). We will likely use a combination of 454 paired-end reads and 100 bp Illumina reads. We are hoping that these sequencing platforms will give us a better view of the centromeres than we obtained using Sanger sequencing for Af293 and A1163, the other two sequenced reference strains. The relationship of these strains to others, by microsatellite typing, is described in our recent paper on azole resistance (Howard et al; Emerg Infect Dis, 2009).

Component 2 is to experimentally determine the gene models for A. fumigatus genes using RNA-seq from the Illumina platform. We will run RNAs from volunteer contributors for multiple conditions to see transcripts from nearly all of the A. fumigatus genes. We will use a pipeline at JCVI to process these reads to identify 5’ and 3’ UTRs, mRNA stop and start sites, intron/exon boundaries, and non-coding RNAs. The information will be incorporated into the annotated version of these four reference genome sequences.

There will be an opportunity for community folks to review and edit the annotation before the project is declared done.

Component 3 is to employ the Illumina sequencing platform to identify SNPs and INDELs from ~45 azole resistant clinical strains, and the original WT susceptible strains. The resultant data set will be available of to those who would like to participate in the analysis of this data. JCVI will provide informatics support for this analysis. These include strains from multiple patients from different locales, different resistance mutations, different decades and some are sequential isolates over time.

Those who have already volunteered to provide total RNAs for Component 2 are:

Brian Wickes

Elaine Bignell

Scott Filler

David Askew

Nancy Keller

Corné Klaassen

Paul Bowyer

Jüergen Löeffler

Fuller details about the strains and program will be posted shortly in the genome section of the Aspergillus website.

Natalie will be presenting a poster at AAA in Rome (assuming it is accepted) describing the project and possible novel analyses. We can discuss these at the meeting, or by e-mail. We do not intend to present, at least for publication, another 'genome paper', but rather focused papers on specific topics. We recognize that combined genomic and phenotypic/experimental data will generate more appropriate community interest than simply more genes and gene annotation.

12/4/09

Asperfest 7 will be March 28, 2010 (evening) and March 29, 2010 (full day) at the NH Conference Centre Leeuwenhorst in The Netherlands immediately before ECFG 10. The meeting will feature a variety of the best work in Aspergillus species. Get details on abstract submission and register online at: http://www.ecfg10.info/. Early registration for ECFG closes December 19, so don't delay.

Programs from Asperfest-6 and other Aspergillus meetings can be found on our homepage. (http://www.fgsc.net/Aspergillus/asperghome.html).

Check out the new FGSC Strain and Plasmid catalog interfaces.

The 2009 Aspergillus Bibliography is now available online as part of Fungal Genetics Reports, 56.

10/28/09

The final program and minutes from AsperFest 6 are now available online as are several photos:

10/14/09

News from the AspGD

Orthologs and syntenic regions

AspGD users can now navigate from A. nidulans genes to orthologs and syntenic regions in the other sequenced Aspergillus species. Links are available from the Locus Summary page that navigate to an interactive comparative visualization tool (please see this example).

Alternatively, the ortholog clusters can be searched for gene name from any Aspergillus species, at http://aspgd.igs.umaryland.edu/.

Orthologs among the sequenced Aspergillus genomes were generated via a modified mutual best hit (MBH) approach, in which close paralogs are collapsed into a single node prior to MBH clustering.

AspGD is using Sybil, an open source, web-based software package for searching and visualizing comparative genome data (http://sybil.sf.net).

A paper entitled "The Aspergillus Genome Database, a curated comparative genomics resource for gene, protein and sequence information for the Aspergillus research community" will appear in the 2010 Database Issue of Nucleic Acids Research. The paper is now available online as a Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access article.

6th International Aspergillus Meeting
March 15-17, 2009
Asilomar, California

Asperfest 6 will be held as a satellite meeting at the 25th Fungal Genetics Conference

Pontecorvo Lecture by

Professor Herb Arst
Imperial College, London

Asperfest6 Final Program
(Now with abstracts! Updated 3/11/09)

GSA Asperfest 6 page

January 2009

Postdoctoral position

The Institute of Microbiology and Genetics, Dept. of Molecular Microbiology and Genetics at the Georg-August-University of Goettingen invites applications for a Postdoctoral position (salary class 13 TV-L) within the BMBF-project “ERA-Net PathoGenoMics: Transcriptional networks controlling virulence in fungal pathogens” for at least three years

Area of research: Molecular analysis of the growth of Aspergillus fumigatus mutants in blood.

Prerequisite: Ph.D. in biology or biochemistry/molecular biology with focus on genetic/biochemistry and/or cell biology. Experience with filamentous fungi and bioinformatics will be of advantage but not required.

The University aims to increase the number of female scientific staff employed and expressly requests applications from qualified women. In the framework of the legal requirements and in the case of equal qualifications, women will be considered preferentially in all areas in which they are under-represented.

Disabled persons will also be considered preferentially in the case of equal aptitude.

Written applications should be sent to Prof. Dr. Gerhard Braus, Institut für Mikrobiologie und Genetik, Abt. Molekulare Mikrobiologie und Genetik, Grisebachstr. 8, D-37077 Göttingen. E-mail: gbraus@gwdg.de until March 1st , 2009.
Please send only copies of your documents (no originals). We will not be able to send back your application and all documents will be destroyed after 3 months.

Scientific Curator

The Aspergillus Genome Database (http://www.aspgd.org/) is a new collaborative project between Jennifer Wortman's group at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Gavin Sherlock's group in the Department of Genetics at Stanford Medical School (which is also responsible for the Candida Genome Database). AspGD has an open position for a scientific curator, available immediately at Stanford University. Ideally, the successful candidate will have a Ph.D. in molecular biology or microbiology, with experience in Aspergillus or another fungal system. More details about the position are available online

All applications must be submitted through the Stanford jobs website.

11/25/08

A. FUMIGATUS KO CASSETTES AVAILABLE FREE
The PFGRC at JCVI has made a set of 70 knock out cassettes for A. fumigatus available. Starting in January, 2009 you will also be able to order up to 12 custom A. fumigatus knock out cassettes of your choice. See more info at: http://pfgrc.jcvi.org/index.php/gateway_clones/available_knockouts.html

WISH YOU COULD COLLABORATE WITH J. CRAIG VENTER INSTITUTE (FORMERLY TIGR)?
The PFGRC at J Craig Venter Institute is calling for white paper proposals. These are essentially mini-grants that allow collaboration between individual researchers and JCVI on Gene Expression studies, Comparative Genomics, Gene Knock Outs, Proteomics and Bioinformatics as well as associated methodologies and technologies.
Pre-proposal deadline December 12, 2008
Final proposal deadline is January 19, 2009.

For more information see:
White Paper Requests - http://pfgrc.jcvi.org/index.php/white_papers/white_papers_main.html
Submission Process - http://pfgrc.jcvi.org/index.php/white_papers/white_papers_requests.html
Review and Selection Process - http://pfgrc.jcvi.org/index.php/white_papers/white_papers_review.html

October 28, 2008

Asperfest6 registration is available at the GSA webpage

Online abstract submission is via the FGSC website.

September 29, 2008

Professor Herb Arst of Imperial College, London, will present the Pontecorvo Lecture at the 6th International Aspergillus Meeting.

September 15, 2008

Asperfest 6 will be held as a satellite meeting at the 25th Fungal Genetics Conference at Asilomar.
The meeting will commence Sunday, March15 with an evening reception and will continue with scientific sessions until Noon on Tuesday, March 17.

March 11, 2008

The program and abstracts for the 5th International Aspergillus meeting are available online.

Please see the updated Asperfest5 home page

January 11, 2008

January 2008 new strain update (pdf)

Return to the FGSC home page