Department of Biology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada.
Laboratoire de Recherche en Sciences Végétales, Université de Toulouse, UPS, CNRS 24 Chemin de Borde Rouge-Auzeville, Castanet-Tolosan, France.
ISME J. 2021 Aug;15(8):2173-2179. doi: 10.1038/s41396-021-00924-y. Epub 2021 Mar 2.
A recent study published by Mateus et al. [1] claimed that 18 "mating-related" genes are differentially expressed in the model arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus (AMF) Rhizophagus irregularis when genetically distinct fungal strains co-colonize a host plant. To clarify the level of evidence for this interesting conclusion, we first aimed to validate the functional annotation of these 18 R. irregularis genes using orthology predictions. These analyses revealed that, although sequence relationship exists, only 2 of the claimed 18 R. irregularis mating genes are potential orthologues to validated fungal mating genes. We also investigated the RNA-seq data from Mateus et al. [1] using classical RNA-seq methods and statistics. This analysis found that the over-expression during strain co-existence was not significant at the typical cut-off of the R. irregularis strains DAOM197198 and B1 in plants. Overall, we do not find convincing evidence that the genes involved have functions in mating, or that they are reproducibly up or down regulated during co-existence in plants.
最近，Mateus 等人发表的一项研究声称，在遗传上不同的真菌菌株共同定殖宿主植物时，模式丛枝菌根真菌（AMF）Rhizophagus irregularis 中有 18 个“交配相关”基因表达差异。为了澄清这一有趣结论的证据水平，我们首先旨在使用同源性预测验证这 18 个 R. irregularis 基因的功能注释。这些分析表明，尽管存在序列关系，但在声称的 18 个 R. irregularis 交配基因中，只有 2 个是经过验证的真菌交配基因的潜在同源基因。我们还使用经典的 RNA-seq 方法和统计学方法研究了 Mateus 等人的 RNA-seq 数据。[1]。这项分析发现，在植物中，与典型的 R. irregularis 菌株 DAOM197198 和 B1 的截止值相比，在菌株共存期间的过表达并不显著。总的来说，我们没有发现令人信服的证据表明这些涉及的基因在交配中具有功能，或者它们在植物中共存期间是否可重复地上调或下调。
