Neurospora in full bloom

摘要

Neurospora, the red bread mould first recognized growing on bread in France (1843), was named as Monilia sitophila. An isolate of this fungus from Japan (1923) was named initially as Oidum aurantiacum, and later changed to M. sitophila. In 1927, Shear and Dodge discovered sexual spores of this fungus. Since it produced ascospores having neuron-like striations resembling neurons, they renamed the genus as Neurospora. The fungus is easily recognized in nature by its distinctive colour due to carotenoid pigments in the conidia which are produced in prodigious number (Figure 1). Ramesh Maheshwari's group at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore was the first to have systematically unravelled the Neurospora life cycle outside the laboratory, in a sugar-cane field. Neurospora took centre stage in 1941, with the pioneering work of Beadle and Tautum leading to the famous 'one gene-one enzyme hypothesis' and, in 1958, to the Nobel Prize. This work brought the disciplines of genetics and biochemistry together. Later work on other model organisms such as Escher-ichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Drosophila melanogaster, led to rapid developments of research in modern biology. With the recent report on the near complete genome sequence data of Neurospora crassa, which is also the first filamentous fungus to be sequenced, once again this organism has come into the limelight. The sequence data have revealed many genes not known in the genomes of bacteria, yeast, Drosophila or humans. Also, there are unique features known only to Neurospora such as the ability to recognize and silence duplicate genes by a process called RIP (repeat induced point mutation).