SummaryThe chestnut blight fungus Cryphonectria parasitica and its hypovirus comprise useful model system to study the mechanisms of hypoviral infection. We used degenerate primers based on fungal protein kinases to isolate a gene, cppk1, which encodes a novel Ser/Thr protein kinase of C. parasitica. The gene showed highest homology to ptk1, a Ser/Thr protein kinase from Trichoderma reesei. The encoded protein had a predicted mass of 70.5 kDa and a pI of 7.45. Northern blot analyses revealed that the cppk1 transcript was expressed from the beginning of culture, with a slight increase by 5 days of culture. However, its expression was specifically affected by the presence of virus, and it was transcriptionally upregulated in the fungal strain infected with the hypovirus. A kinase assay using Escherichia coliderived CpPK1 revealed CpPK1-specific phosphorylated proteins with estimated masses of 50 kDa and 44 kDa. In addition, the phosphorylation of both proteins was higher in a cell-free extract from the hypovirulent strain. The increased expression of cppk1 by the introduction of an additional copy results in a subset of viral symptoms of reduced pigmentation and conidiation in a virus-free isolate. cppk1 overexpression also causes the downregulation of mating factor genes Mf2/1 and Mf2/2, resulting in female sterility. The present study suggests that the hypovirus disturbs fungal signalling by transcriptional upregulation of cppk1, which results in reduced pigmentation and conidiation and female sterility.
Copy-number variation (CNV) in particular genomic segments owing to deletions or duplications can induce changes in cellular gene expression patterns and may increase susceptibility to diseases such as cancer. The aim of this study was to examine CNVs related to the incidence of epithelial ovarian cancer in chickens. Genomic DNA was extracted from blood cells and cancerous ovaries collected from four 120-week-old White Leghorn chickens and were used for array-based comparative genome hybridization (CGH) analysis. As a result, 25 amplified and 10 deleted CNV regions were detected in chicken ovarian cancer. Of these, 10 amplified and two deleted CNV regions contained genes associated with human ovarian cancer. Our study using a chicken model may provide a better understanding of human epithelial ovarian cancer.
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