Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Mycorrhizal fungi play critical roles in host plant health, soil community structure and chemistry, and carbon and nutrient cycling, all areas of intense interest to the US Dept. of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI). To this end we are building on our earlier sequencing of the Laccaria bicolor genome by partnering with INRA-Nancy and the mycorrhizal research community in the MGI to sequence and analyze dozens of mycorrhizal genomes of all Basidiomycota and Ascomycota orders and multiple ecological types (ericoid, orchid, and ectomycorrhizal). JGI has developed and deployed high-throughput sequencing techniques, and Assembly, RNASeq, and Annotation Pipelines. In 2012 alone we sequenced, assembled, and annotated 12 draft or improved genomes of mycorrhizae, and predicted ~;232831 genes and ~;15011 multigene families, All of this data is publicly available on JGI MycoCosm (http://jgi.doe.gov/fungi/), which provides access to both the genome data and tools with which to analyze the data. Preliminary comparisons of the current total of 14 public mycorrhizal genomes suggest that 1) short secreted proteins potentially involved in symbiosis are more enriched in some orders than in others amongst the mycorrhizal Agaricomycetes, 2) there are wide ranges of numbers of genes involved in certain functional categories, such as signal transduction and post-translational modification, and 3) novel gene families are specific to some ecological types.