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Fungal biology in the post-genomic era

In this review I give a personal perspective of how fungal biology has changed since I started my Ph. D. in 1963. At that time we were working in the shadow of the birth of molecular biology as an autonomous and reductionistic discipline, embodied in Crick’s central dogma. This first period was meth...

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Autor principal: Scazzocchio, Claudio
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5611559/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28955449
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40694-014-0007-6
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author Scazzocchio, Claudio
author_facet Scazzocchio, Claudio
author_sort Scazzocchio, Claudio
collection PubMed
description In this review I give a personal perspective of how fungal biology has changed since I started my Ph. D. in 1963. At that time we were working in the shadow of the birth of molecular biology as an autonomous and reductionistic discipline, embodied in Crick’s central dogma. This first period was methodologically characterised by the fact that we knew what genes were, but we could not access them directly. This radically changed in the 70s-80s when gene cloning, reverse genetics and DNA sequencing become possible. The “next generation” sequencing techniques have produced a further qualitative revolutionary change. The ready access to genomes and transcriptomes of any microbial organism allows old questions to be asked in a radically different way and new questions to be approached. I provide examples chosen somewhat arbitrarily to illustrate some of these changes, from applied aspects to fundamental problems such as the origin of fungal specific genes, the evolutionary history of genes clusters and the realisation of the pervasiveness of horizontal transmission. Finally, I address how the ready availability of genomes and transcriptomes could change the status of model organisms. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40694-014-0007-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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spelling pubmed-56115592017-09-27 Fungal biology in the post-genomic era Scazzocchio, Claudio Fungal Biol Biotechnol Review In this review I give a personal perspective of how fungal biology has changed since I started my Ph. D. in 1963. At that time we were working in the shadow of the birth of molecular biology as an autonomous and reductionistic discipline, embodied in Crick’s central dogma. This first period was methodologically characterised by the fact that we knew what genes were, but we could not access them directly. This radically changed in the 70s-80s when gene cloning, reverse genetics and DNA sequencing become possible. The “next generation” sequencing techniques have produced a further qualitative revolutionary change. The ready access to genomes and transcriptomes of any microbial organism allows old questions to be asked in a radically different way and new questions to be approached. I provide examples chosen somewhat arbitrarily to illustrate some of these changes, from applied aspects to fundamental problems such as the origin of fungal specific genes, the evolutionary history of genes clusters and the realisation of the pervasiveness of horizontal transmission. Finally, I address how the ready availability of genomes and transcriptomes could change the status of model organisms. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40694-014-0007-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2014-10-14 /pmc/articles/PMC5611559/ /pubmed/28955449 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40694-014-0007-6 Text en © Scazzocchio; licensee BioMed Central 2014 This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Review
Scazzocchio, Claudio
Fungal biology in the post-genomic era
title Fungal biology in the post-genomic era
title_full Fungal biology in the post-genomic era
title_fullStr Fungal biology in the post-genomic era
title_full_unstemmed Fungal biology in the post-genomic era
title_short Fungal biology in the post-genomic era
title_sort fungal biology in the post-genomic era
topic Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5611559/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28955449
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40694-014-0007-6
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