New ‘layer’ exposed in fungi

The project was a collaboration between the Delft Bioinformatics lab and the Fungal Microbiology Group at Utrecht University and the findings were published in Nature Scientific Reports. Their research explored alternative splicing in a species of fungi called Schizophyllum commune.

“Alternative splicing allows an organism to describe multiple proteins in an efficient way, possibly allowing the organism to respond to more situations than it otherwise could,” explained Thies Gehrmann, TU Delft PhD candidate and first author of the paper.

“What we did was to identify all the different proteins that were produced by the same gene, and to predict the function of each one. We found thousands of genes which produced multiple proteins. Of these, there were more than a thousand proteins which had different predicted functions than other proteins produced by the same gene. We previously had no idea that these proteins existed. Suddenly, the functional capability of this fungus was extended by thousands of new proteins. Imagine what you could do if you suddenly knew two thousand phrases in a foreign language,” he added.

Fungi have various industrial applications (for example, the production of beer and medicines) and are important in agriculture. Mushrooms are also a food source and Schizophyllum commune itself is a mushroom. Many fungi also function as plant and human pathogens and this discovery will also have ramifications in medical research.

“The process of forming mushrooms is very complicated, and we have shown that alternative splicing is used in different stages of this process. It is possible that different proteins produced from the same gene are responsible for different stages of mushroom development. If we did not know about these proteins, we might never truly understand mushroom formation,” said Gehrmann.