- Crouch, Jo Anne;
- Dawe, Angus;
- Aerts, Andrea;
- Barry, Kerrie;
- Churchill, Alice CL;
- Grimwood, Jane;
- Hillman, Bradley I;
- Milgroom, Michael G;
- Pangilinan, Jasmyn;
- Smith, Myron;
- Salamov, Asaf;
- Schmutz, Jeremy;
- Yadav, Jagjit S;
- Grigoriev, Igor V;
- Nuss, Donald L
Cryphonectria parasitica is the causal agent of chestnut blight, a fungal disease that almost entirely eliminated mature American chestnut from North America over a 50-year period. Here, we formally report the genome of C. parasitica EP155 using a Sanger shotgun sequencing approach. After finishing and integration with simple-sequence repeat markers, the assembly was 43.8 Mb in 26 scaffolds (L50 = 5; N50 = 4.0Mb). Eight chromosomes are predicted: five scaffolds have two telomeres and six scaffolds have one telomere sequence. In total, 11,609 gene models were predicted, of which 85% show similarities to other proteins. This genome resource has already increased the utility of a fundamental plant pathogen experimental system through new understanding of the fungal vegetative incompatibility system, with significant implications for enhancing mycovirus-based biological control.