Overview

A. fumigatus

A. fumigatus causes more infections worldwide than any other mould. Four percent of all patients dying in tertiary care hospitals in Europe have invasive aspergillosis. The fungus causes allergic deseases in asthmatics and patients suffering from cystic fibrosis. Invasive aspergillosis can occur in individuals with cavities caused by tuberculosis or other cystic lung diseases. More information about A. fumigatus can be found at the Aspergillus web site.

Although A. fumigatus is medically important, very little is known about its genetic makeup. Before inception of the whole genome project, less than 60 complete genes had been cloned and published. In contrast, extensive genomic analysis had been carried out on the model fungi Neurospora crassa and Aspergillus nidulans.

The Project

The Sanger Institute and its collaborators, Dr. David Denning and Dr. Andrew Brass at the University of Manchester, were initially funded to carry out a pilot genomic analysis of Aspergillus fumigatus. This involved preparing a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) library, to fingerprint 3000 BAC clones generating a physical map and then sequencing 10 physically linked BAC clones. A. fumigatus has an genome size of ~30 Mb. The results of this study are published in Pain et al. (2004)

The Sanger Institute was then funded to carry our a whole genome shotgun of A. fumigatus in collaboration with The Institute of Genome Research (TIGR). This sequencing is finished and the genome is published in Nierman et al. (2005).

Sequence Data

All sequence data produced are freely available. The data can be searched using our BLAST server. An FTP site has been set up so that the raw data can be down-loaded.

The annotation data of the 10 physically linked BAC clones are also available through GeneDB