Bioinformatics

FABI News

News Archive

15 May 2024

35<sup>th</sup> SANSOR Congress – connect, collaborate and create change

35^th SANSOR Congress – connect, collaborate and create change

Prof. Dave Berger attended the 35^th SANSOR Congress which was held recently in the Cape.

13 May 2024

The power of partnerships demonstrated at #TPCP2024

The Tree Protection Co-operative Programme (TPCP) in FABI celebrated its 35th Annual Meeting at the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Future Africa Campus on 7-8 May.

9 May 2024

FABI hosts eLife Senior Editor at publishing workshop

Dr Nicky Creux and the FABI social media team hosted a hybrid Publishing Workshop in partnership with eLife on 8 May.

8 May 2024

Two new Wattle pests detected

Two new pests of Wattle (Acacia mearnsii) plantation trees have been detected by the TPCP field extension and diagnostic services.

2 May 2024

BUAN delegation visits UP and FABI

FABI hosted a delegation of four senior representative of the Botswana University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (BUAN).

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FABI Events

20 May 08h30

Monday Morning Meeting

Monday Morning Meeting

FABI in a nutshell

Research Features

Archive

A new study reveals the presence of Mycotoxins in Eastern Cape maize in South Africa.

Eurotiales update: FABIans Prof. Cobus Visagie and Dr Neriman Yilmaz and their collaborators have published a review of recently described Eurotiales species, including the economically important Aspergillus, Penicillium, Paecilomyces and Talaromyces.

Da Vinci's Yeast: FABIans Prof. Cobus Visagie, Dr Neriman Yilmaz, and their collaborators have recently described and named a newly discovered yeast species of the famous Italian painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect Leonardo da Vinci.

The potential economic impact of the PSHB invasion in South Africa has been calculated to be a massive R275 billion over the next ten years, if nothing is done to stop the spread of this invasive beetle. Researchers from FABI collaborated with Stellenbosch University ecologists and economists to model the unmitigated economic impact of this invasion.

A recently published paper in the journal Current Forestry Reports documents a collaboration between an international team of forest pathologists and invasion scientists. Led by Dr Trudy Paap, the authors present a framework for conceptualizing and managing invasive forest pathogens.

A recently published review article by Dr Andi Wilson in a special issue of the journal 'Microbiology & Molecular Biology Reviews' provides details of the genes that are essential to the sexual cycle in filamentous Ascomycete fungi and further describes their functions in a variety of model and non-model species.

Penicillium section Canescentia re-evaluated and five new species described from the fynbos biome in South Africa.

In November 2019, the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology hosted a workshop on ‘Frameworks used in Invasion Science’. The workshop led to a NeoBiota special issue on this theme, and includes a review by FABI researchers and international colleagues, exploring frameworks in the context of forest pathology.

A doctoral study in FABI confirms for the first time the presence of Xylosandrus crassiusculus, a polyphagous ambrosia beetle and its fungal symbiont, Ambroseilla roeperi, in three provinces in South Africa. The authors warn that this beetle species could be a threat to native and plantation trees.

A review on invasive gall-forming wasps that threaten non-native Eucalyptus plantations by researchers in the TPCP appears in Agricultural and Forest Entomology. They profile several species of likely Australian origin that have established on non-native Eucalyptus plantations globally and discuss various challenges to their management.

A study in the TPCP confirms the identity of seven novel fungal species associated with Dendroctonus valens, the red turpentine beetle. The study follows on surveys on the fungal associates of the beetle in China and North America. Results from this work appear in Persoonia.

A postdoctoral study in the TPCP describes two novel Huntiella species in the African clade, bringing the number of known species in the genus to 31. Though closely related, the two species display different mating systems. Outcomes from this study appear in the journal MycoKeys.

A review of the invasion history and global management strategies of Eucalyptus snout beetles in the Gonipterus scutellatus species complex by researchers in the TPCP appears in the Journal of Pest Science.

In a collaborative venture with Dr Jos Houbraken (Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute, the Netherlands), Prof. Cobus M Visagie, Dr Neriman Yilmaz (both from FABI) and others have recently completed and published a major study updating the taxonomy of the Eurotiales.

A study in the Forest Molecular Genetics (FMG) Programme at FABI interrogates the benefits of implementing genomic selection for growth and wood quality traits in an established Eucalyptus grandis breeding programme in South Africa. Outcomes from this study appear in an article.

The first study on alternative weed and cultivated hosts of Spongospora subterraneaf. sp. subterranea (Sss), in southern Africa identifies two species as ideal trap crops for rotation with potatoes. The study also introduces three new families to the known hosts of Sss in the region.

A consortium of microbiologists from around the globe, FABI included, is pushing for an overhaul in how scientific names are assigned to uncultivated bacteria and archaea. Despite their ecological, agricultural and medical importance, these organisms traditionally have not been recognized by the international body governing the nomenclature of prokaryotes.

Professor Cobus Visagie is a researcher in the Applied Mycology group at FABI. One of the group’s research goals is to discover fungal diversity in South Africa, and Cobus’ research is strongly focussed on the economically important genera Aspergillus, Penicillium and Talaromyces.

Postdoctoral research by Dr Norman Muzhinji in the Potato Pathology Programme at the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI) sheds light on the genetic structure and diversity of Spongospora subterranea f. sp. subterranea in four potato-growing regions in South Africa, providing valuable insights on its management.

An MSc study by Kira Lynn in the RGE-FABI Tree Health Programme at the University of Pretoria has described a new Fusarium species, Fusarium rekanum sp. nov., associated with Euwallacea perbrevis, an ambrosia beetle species infesting Acacia crassicarpa plantations in Riau, Indonesia.

FABI postdoctoral Fellow Dr Andi Wilson has established a CRISPR-Cas9-based genome editing protocol for use in Huntiella omanensis, a tree-inhabiting fungus belonging to the Ceratocystidaceae family.

Research undertaken as part of a PhD study by Molly Malefo at the University of Pretoria’s Department of Plant and Soil Sciences and Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute sheds more light on the role of protease inhibitors in plants under drought stress.

The South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) has funded a postdoctoral research project dedicated to monitoring plant health in botanical gardens and arboreta across South Africa. Two postdoctoral Fellows at the University of Pretoria’s Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute have held these fellowships.

The first comprehensive study mapping the distribution and genetic diversity of invasive Eucalyptus insect pests in sub-Saharan Africa confirms the presence of five major foliage-feeding species in 14 countries. The results of this study have implications on the quarantine, future research and management of these pests on the continent and beyond.

Dr Joey Hulbert broke new ground when he became the first candidate at the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute to complete a PhD study incorporating citizen science. Citizen science is an approach that involves members of the public as active participants in scientific research.

FABI technology unravels the genetics behind fungal genome evolution The RIPper is a bioinformatics tool for the for quantifying genome-wide RIP mutations in fungal genomes. The strength of this software lies in the automation of laborious techniques to study the mutation process called Repeat-Induced Point mutations (RIP). The RIPper applies these technique

With the increased availability in genome data, inferences regarding evolutionary relationships among taxa can now be performed on a genome-wide scale. But it is widely accepted that not all parts of such massive datasets support the same evolutionary hypothesis. Because of this, a group of researchers at FABI recently investigated the effect of this.

The use of genome data to characterize species and elucidate relationships, particularly between problematic taxa, has become routine practice in bacteria. Recently, researchers from FABI joined in an international effort to describe two novel genera and characterize these within the larger context of the important bacterial group Burkholderia.

A PhD student in FABI, Runlei Chang, has discovered and described 19 new fungal species from China as part of the research for his thesis. These fungi are all associated with conifer-infesting bark beetles and their mites and belong to well-known genera such as Ophiostoma and Leptographium.

Two research papers from FABI were selected as cover stories in two consecutive issues of the international journal, Plant Pathology. The journal is published by Wiley for the British Society of Plant Pathology.

Plastids play an integral role in wood formation, and yet they are routinely ignored in the study of xylogenesis in forest trees. Desre Pinard and Dr Eshchar Mizrachi have published a review highlighting the unique biology of plastids in wood, suggesting that a new type of plastid, the xylopast, exists.

Approaches for characterizing metabolic potential from genomic sequences have previously been predicted to be useful in the description of bacterial taxa. Dr Marike Palmer, has recently employed these approaches for identifying biological processes contributing to the divergence of bacteria with a variety of lifestyles.

Comparative genomics is shaping our notion of what fungal species are. Based on current data, these unique evolutionary units are separated from one another by boundaries that are porous under certain conditions. This affects our expectations regarding their population biology and evolution, and our strategies for recognizing and controlling them.

The Polyphagous Shot Hole Borer is an ambrosia beetle native to Southeast Asia. In 2017 this pest was detected in South Africa. Its presence has since been confirmed in all provinces except Limpopo. The beetle has a symbiotic relationship with the fungus Fusarium euwallaceae, which causes branch die-back and death of susceptible trees.

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The FMG Bioinformatics Platform is hosted in the Centre for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Pretoria. Our team consists of a MIT big data science MSc student, Mr Christopher Marais, and a postdoctoral fellow, Dr Nanette Christie.

Working alongside biologists and geneticists in the FMG Programme, we are able to support and build capacity for the analysis, management and interpretation of large amounts of genomics and transcriptomics data for hundreds to thousands of individual trees. Web services, novel and commercial software, as well as a Galaxy workflow environment have been implemented to facilitate modular development of data processing and visualisation pipelines. These pipelines can be accessed remotely by group members for high-throughput genomics analysis and enable quality control, processing of raw data and downstream analyses such as gene and genome annotation, gene expression analysis, detection of genomic variants, and discovery of genetics associations with phenotypic traits.

We worked with colleagues at the Umea Plant Science Centre in Sweden on the integration of the Eucalyptus Genome Integrative Explorer (EucGenIE) into PlantGenIE (plantgenie.org), a dedicated web portal for genome and transcriptome exploration in plants (also including poplar, Norway spruce, and Arabidopsis). We also developed a web resource to query and visualise Eucalyptus systems genetics data, such as expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) networks. We envision our genetic variation tool (qtlXplorer) to be a significant building block towards a population genomics module in PlantGenIE.

We are also hosting a genomic breeding database (BioPlasm) providing data access and analysis tools for tree breeders of our industry partners.

Workshops & Symposia

Archive

African Fungus Day 2024, 23 May

New Publications

Marais I, Buitendag C, Duong TA, Crampton BG, Theron J, Kidanemarium D, Berger DK. (2024) Double-stranded RNA uptake for the control of the maize pathogen Cercospora zeina. Plant Pathology Online first:1-11. 10.1111/ppa.13909

van Heerden A, Pham NQ, Wingfield BD, Wingfield MJ, Muro Abad JI, Durán A, Wilken PM. (2024) LAMP assay to detect Elsinoë necatrix; an important Eucalyptus shoot and leaf pathogen. Plant Disease 10.1094/PDIS-01-24-0086-RE

Silva GA, Oliveira MES, Rêgo GMS, Wingfield BD, Wingfield MJ, Ferreira MA. (2024) Chrysoporthe brasiliensis sp. nov. pathogenic to Melastomataceae in southeast Brazil. Fungal Biology 10.1016/j.funbio.2024.04.001

Fick A, Swart V, Bombarely A, van den Berg N. (2024) Comparative transcriptional analysis of Persea americana MYB, WRKY and AP2/ERF transcription factors following Phytophthora cinnamomi infection. Molecular Plant Pathology 25(4):e13453. 10.1111/mpp.13453

Van Lill M, Venter SN, Muema EK, Palmer M., Beukes CW, Chan WY, Steenkamp ET. (2024) SeqCode facilitates naming of South African rhizobia left in limbo. Systematics and Applied Microbiology 47(2-3):126504. 10.1016/j.syapm.2024.126504

Visagie CM, Meyer H, Yilmaz N. (2024) Maize–Fusarium associations and their mycotoxins: Insights from South Africa. Fungal Biology 10.1016/j.funbio.2024.03.009

Elisa P, Allison J, Hurley BP, Slippers B, Fourie G. (2024) Lethal and sublethal effects of insecticides on Bathycoelia distincta (Heteroptera: Pentatomidae). African Entomology 32: e16992:1-9. 10.17159/2254-8854/2024/a16992

Pietersen G, Morgan S, Read DA. (2024) First report of Citrus concave gum-associated virus (CCGaV) on apple (Malus spp.) in South Africa. Journal of Plant Pathology 10.1007/s42161-024-01629-9

Gush S, Lebre P, Coutinho TA, Cowan DA, van der Waals JE. (2024) Disentangling shifts in the soil microbiome of potatoes infected with Rhizoctonia solani Anastomosis Group 3-PT in search of potential biocontrol agents. Phytobiomes Journal 10.1094/PBIOMES-06-23-0046-R

Dankie VN, Steenkamp ET, De Vos L, Swalarsk-Parry BS, Dewing C, Fru F, Wilken PM, Mchunu NP, Wingfield BD, Wingfield MJ, van der Nest MA. (2024) Growth, pathogenicity and sexual fertility of the African tree pathogen Ceratocystis albifundus. Journal of Plant Pathology :1-11. 10.1007/s42161-024-01634-y

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