Research Topic E - U. maydis, a model for cell biology
Research articles
Münsterkötter, M. & Steinberg, G. The fungus Ustilago maydis and humans share disease-related proteins that are not found in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. BMC Genomics, 8, 473.
Summary - This paper provides a genome-wide comparison of the predicted proteome of U. maydis, humans and the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We demonstrate the U. maydis shares more proteins with humans than with its fungal cousin. A large portion of these are of unknown function, suggesting that work on these proteins in U. maydis could provide novel insights into mammalian cell biology. The identification of numerous uncharacterized proteins conserved between humans and U. maydis is the first step into the unknown and this might help establishing U. maydis as an important model system for general cell biology.
Review articles
Steinberg, G. and Perez-Martin, J (2007) Ustilago maydis, a new fungal model system for cell biology. Trends Cell Biol., 18, 61-67.
Figure 1: Comparison of the predicted proteome of U. maydis, S. cerevisiae and humans at a 20% identity over the whole length cut-off. Note that U. maydis shares more predicted proteins with humans than with its fungal cousins. Graph is modified from Münsterkötter & Steinberg, 2007, BMC Genomics, 8, 473. More information on the annotated U. maydis genome can be found at http://mips.gsf.de/genre/proj/ustilago/.