PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Colin Clairet
AU  - Nicolas Lapalu
AU  - Adeline Simon
AU  - Jessica L. Soyer
AU  - Muriel Viaud
AU  - Enric Zehraoui
AU  - Berengère Dalmais
AU  - Isabelle Fudal
AU  - Nadia Ponts
TI  - Nucleosome patterns in four plant pathogenic fungi with contrasted genome structures
AID  - 10.1101/2021.04.16.439968
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.04.16.439968
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/04/16/2021.04.16.439968.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/04/16/2021.04.16.439968.full
AB  - Fungal pathogens represent a serious threat towards agriculture, health, and environment. Control of fungal diseases on crops necessitates a global understanding of fungal pathogenicity determinants and their expression during infection. Genomes of phytopathogenic fungi are often compartmentalized: the core genome contains housekeeping genes whereas the fast-evolving genome mainly contains transposable elements and species-specific genes. In this study, we analysed nucleosome landscapes of four phytopathogenic fungi with contrasted lifestyles and genome organisations to describe and compare nucleosome repartition patterns in relation with genome structure and gene expression level. We combined MNase-seq and RNA-seq analyses to concomitantly map nucleosome-rich and transcriptionally active regions during fungal growth in axenic culture; we developed the tool MSTS to analyse and visualise data obtained from MNase-seq experiments in combination with other genomic data and notably RNA-seq expression data. We observed different characteristics of nucleosome profiles between species, as well as between genomic regions within the same species. We further linked nucleosome repartition and gene expression. Our findings support that nucleosome positioning and occupancies are subjected to evolution, in relation with underlying genome sequence modifications. Understanding genomic organisation and its role in expression regulation is the next gear to understand complex cellular mechanisms and their evolution.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.