Gene regulatory network reconstruction in wheat pathogen Fusarium graminearum
L. GUO (1), G. Zhao (1), X. Zhou (2), W. Jonkers (3), C. H. Kistler (4), J. R. Xu (2), L. Gao (1), L. J. Ma (1). (1) University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, U.S.A.; (2) Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, U.S.A.; (3) University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, U.S.A.; (4) USDA-ARS, St. Paul, MN, U.S.A.
Genus <i>Fusarium</i> contains pathogens that infect hundreds of crop plants as well as humans and thus threatens global food safety and human health. Diseases caused by this group of organisms are modulated by their Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs). Reconstructing GRNs that dynamically control all cellular functions will enable a comprehension of the complex biological processes related to pathogenesis and have broad implications in disease controls. We will report a systems biology approach to infer GRNs of <i>F. graminearum</i>, the causal agent of head blight in wheat and barley. A robust searching algorithm combining Bayesian networks model and hierarchical clustering algorithm was developed. We tested the algorithm on a collection of 198 <i>F. graminearum</i> transcriptomic datasets including both existing data from PLEXdb and the data generated in our lab to infer the relationship between candidate regulators and their target genes. Preliminary validation of the inferred networks using prior biological knowledge proofs the effectiveness of the program. In addition, we comparatively analyzed transcriptomes of <i>F. graminearum</i>, <i>F. verticillioides</i> and <i>F. oxysporum</i> f.sp. <i>lycopersici</i> under stress conditions and mutations to study the functional conservation of <i>Fusarium</i> core genomes, judging by their gene expression under same biological conditions. The conservation of the regulatory modules will allow us to transfer the network knowledge gained from <i>F. graminearum</i> to other <i>Fusarium</i> spp.
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