A new publication for SBI co-workers, this time in the eminent Nature Microbiology Journal. The publication has been also awarded the Medac Research Prize for 2021.
The SBI members Tongta Sae-Ong, Amelia Barber, Bastian Seelbinder and Gianni Panagiotou are the authors of the publication "Pangenome analysis of Aspergillus fumigatus identifies genetic variants associated with human infection" that have been published in the Nature Microbiology Journal.
This study is the first to show that clinical isolates of a human fungal pathogen carry a distinct genomic profile relative to environmental isolates. It is also the first to characterize the pangenome of a eukaryotic human pathogen in depth, highlighting the diversity present, as well as how it contributes to virulence and antifungal drug resistance.
This work also substantially increases the number of available genome assemblies for Aspergillus fumigatus, from 24 to 276, as well as provides a considerable number of environmental genomes which have been thus far underrepresented in sequencing studies. This study will be of interest to broad range of readers, including researchers focused on antimicrobial resistance, genome biology and fungal pathogenesis, as well as a ressource for the medical mycology community.
Original publication