Exploring Mitogenomes Diversity of Fusarium musae from Banana Fruits and Human Patients

Abstract

Fusarium musae has recently been described as a cross-kingdom pathogen causing post-harvest disease in bananas and systemic and superficial infection in humans. The taxonomic identity of fungal cross-kingdom pathogens is essential for confirming the identification of the species on distant infected hosts. Understanding the level of variability within the species is essential to decipher the population homogeneity infecting human and plant hosts. In order to verify that F. musae strains isolated from fruits and patients are part of a common population and to estimate their overall diversity, we assembled, annotated and explored the diversity of the mitogenomes of 18 F. musae strains obtained from banana fruits and human patients. The mitogenomes showed a high level of similarity among strains with different hosts’ origins, with sizes ranging from 56,493 to 59,256 bp. All contained 27 tRNA genes and 14 protein-coding genes, rps3 protein, and small and large ribosomal subunits (rns and rnl). Variations in the number of endonucleases were detected. A comparison of mitochondrial endonucleases distribution with a diverse set of Fusarium mitogenomes allowed us to specifically discriminate F. musae from its sister species F. verticillioides and the other Fusarium species. Despite the diversity in F. musae mitochondria, strains from bananas and strains from human patients group together, indirectly confirming F. musae as a cross-kingdom pathogen.

The complete mitochondrial genome of the rice blast fungus Pyricularia oryzae Cavara 1892 strain Guy11 and phylogenetic analysis

“… 2020 ), Fusarium musae strain NRRL 43658 ON240982 (Degradi et al. 2022 ), leptographium terebrantis isolate WIN662 OP973818 (unpublished), grosmannia fruticeta strain WIN(M) 1600 OQ851465 (unpublished).…”

Human Pathogens in Primary Production Systems

“…As both experiments were performed under field-realistic circumstances, the key message derived from both manuscripts is critical for practice, because it would imply that plant roots are potential carriers of human pathogens once they are disseminated into production systems via external sources. The ability for microbial species to jump over from plant to animal kingdoms was indicated for two taxonomically distinct micro-organisms, Fusarium musae [ 13 ] and Bacillus cereus [ 14 ]. Namely, F. musae strains with the same genetic profile could infect both humans and plants (banana fruit), whereas B. cereus strains derived from 17 different agricultural soils sampled across Europe possessed genes that are potentially involved in human pathogenicity.…”