식물의학과 식물의학과

Green means "GO", Red means "STOP": Light sensing and signaling fungi

Youn-Sig Kwak

Department of Plant Medicine, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju

Light is a major environmental factor that affects many biological processes in living creatures including fungi. Light is both a positive and a negative stimulus that provides a mechanism to sense the environment (1). More than 100 fungal species have been shown to respond to light (1). Fungal development and behaviors primarily regulated by light signals include spore germination, hyphal growth, branching, and formation of reproductive structures for spore formation and dispersal (2).-중략-

References

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2. 2. Corrochano L. 2007. Fungal photoreceptors: sensory molecules for fungal development and behaviour. 2007. Photochemical & Photobiological Science. 6:725-736.
3. 3. Froehlic AC., Noh B., Vierstra RD., Loros J., Dunlap JC. 2005. Genetic and molecular analysis of phytochromes from the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa. Eukaryotic Cell. 4:2140-2152.
4. 4. He Q., Cheng P., Yang Y., Wang L., Gardner K., Liu Y. 2002. White collar-1, a DNA binding trnascription factor and a light sensor. Science. 297:840-843.
5. 5. Kihara J., Moriwaki A., Tanaka N., Ueno M., Arase S. 2007. Characterization of the BLR1 gene encoding a putative blue-light regulator in the phytopathogenic fungus Bipolaris oryzae. FEMS Microbiol Lett. 266:110-118.
6. 6. Lee K., Singh P., Chung W., Ash J., Kim T., Hang L., Park S. 2006. Light regulation of asexual development in the rice blast fungus, Magnaporthe oryzae. Fungal Genetics and Biology. 43:694-706.
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FitSearch: a robust way to interpret a yeast fitness profile in terms of drug’s mode-of-action

Minho Lee

Department of Plant Medicine, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju

Background: Yeast deletion-mutant collections have been successfully used to infer the mode-of-action of drugs especially by profiling chemical-genetic and genetic-genetic interactions on a genome-wide scale. Although tens of thousands of those profiles are publicly available, a lack of an accurate method for mining such data has been a major bottleneck for more widespread use of these useful resources.

Results: For general usage of those public resources, we designed FitRankDB as a general repository of fitness profiles, and developed a new search algorithm, FitSearch, for identifying the profiles that have a high similarity score with statistical significance for a given fitness profile. We demonstrated that our new repository and algorithm are highly beneficial to researchers who attempting to make hypotheses based on unknown modes-of-action of bioactive compounds, regardless of the types of experiments that have been performed using yeast deletion-mutant collection in various types of different measurement platforms, especially non-chip-based platforms.

Conclusions: We showed that our new database and algorithm are useful when attempting to construct a hypothesis regarding the unknown function of a bioactive compound through small-scale experiments with a yeast deletion collection in a platform independent manner. The FitRankDB and FitSearch enhance the ease of searching public yeast fitness profiles and obtaining insights into unknown mechanisms of action of drugs. FitSearch is freely available at http://fitsearch.kaist.ac.kr.