Discussion

Abhishek Kumar and Frank Kempken
Department of Genetics & Molecular Biology in Botany, Institute of Botany,
Christian-Albrechts-University at Kiel, Kiel, Germany
Email: akumar@bot.uni-kiel.de | fkempken@bot.uni-kiel.de

Several hundreds of marine fungi species are known which possess unique features, as they have to adopt to the marine environment. The enormous biodiversity of marine fungi is mirrored by the molecular diversity of their secondary metabolites. However, very little is known about marine fungal genetic resources, as they are ignored because they constitute very small fraction of over million of fungal species. Here, we report the first genomic sequence of a marine isolate of Scopulariopsis brevicaulis. S. brevicaulis is known to produce the cyclic peptides Scopularide A and B. This species is common soil saprophyte and has been isolated from a wide variety of substrates. Some species of this genus are reported to cause human diseases.
We have established the genomic sequence of a marine isolate of S. brevicaulis using three different next-generation sequencing methods namely, Roche 454, Illumina and ion-torrent. The assembled genome of S. brevicaulis is ~32 Mb in size with N50 equals to 88 kb and 935 contigs containing 16298 genes with average intron length equals to 129.4. During annotation process, we were able to annotate 9340 genes (57.31 %) while 6958 genes (43.69 %) remained non-annotated in S. brevicaulis genome. This genome has 17 genes encoding for non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs), 18 polyketide synthases (PKSs) and one gene is hybrid NRPS-PKS.