Due to occurrence of resistance to agriculturally used fungicides there is a permanent need for development of new fungicidal agents to guarantee a high productive and high qualitative crop production in the future. The aim of this work was to isolate genes which are up regulated during fungal spore germination for further use as targets in target-specific development of new antifungal agents. Two PCR-based differential screening techniques, cDNA amplified fragment length polymorphism (cDNA-AFLP) and suppression subtractive hybridisation (SSH), were successfully applied to clone 50 and 47 cDNA copies with up regulated expression during spore germination in the plant pathogens Phytophthora infestans and Pyrenophora teres respectively. 14 cDNA clones were further analysed by real time RT-PCR. The normalisation of differentially expressed transcripts was done with 18S rRNA sequence, which has proven to be a suitable standard for normalisation in quantitative gene expression studies on germinating fungal spores. All transcripts showed a significant increase of expression during spore germination, confirming the reliability of the cDNA-AFLP and SSH results. Sequence analysis with 97 cDNA clones revealed 35 unique sequences with significant similarity to database entries. 18 sequences showed homology to genes which are essential in spore germination, including genes of the Ca2+/phosphoinositide signalling system and the cAMP/PKA signal transduction pathway, as well as genes involved in transcription and protein biosynthesis. The remaining genes have predicted functions in cellular metabolism, cellular transport, cellular communication, cell division, spore adhesion, and stress defence. New target-specific methods allow a more rapid and specific development of new antifungal agents compared to conventional on high throughput screenings based methods. Due to high sequence specificity to fungal organisms and potential essentiality in fungal spore germination several of the identified and characterised genes represent promising candidates in a target-specific fungicide design.
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Due to occurrence of resistance to agriculturally used fungicides there is a permanent need for development of new fungicidal agents to guarantee a high productive and high qualitative crop production in the future. The aim of this work was to isolate genes which are up regulated during fungal spore germination for further use as targets in target-specific development of new antifungal agents. Two PCR-based differential screening techniques, cDNA amplified fragment length polymorphism (cDNA-AFLP)...
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