Should the hyphal tips emerging from the terminal cells of conidia be propagated? Is it correct to use the whole conidium for single spore culture? Is there a chance of observing allelic difference when monoconidial cultures are used for sequencing?
Dear Ramya, Ascomycetes fungi live in an aploid state and sexual reproduction, including the "perfect" diploid state, lasts for a small time.
So, each colony originated by a single cell (sexual spore, conidium, hyphae cell etc.) has the same genome. You can find allelic differences only when you work with teleomorphs.
But I guess it will not frequently happen.
So don't worry, if you inoculate a petri dish with one conidium (or, if you work with non-sporulating fungi, a single hyphae cell), you will get a monoclonal colony.
Ramya, if your conidia are monocellular and mononucleate you can be sure that the colony that arise from a single conidium is homocaryotic (all nuclei are identical). In this situation, if your fungus is heterocaryotic (genetically different nuclei in the same hyphal tip/cell), the use of single conidia resolve the heterocaryon and you can have genetically different colonies that can (or cannot, according to the genetic differences) show a different phenotype. But frequently conidia are monocellular but multinucleate or they can be multicellular. Such conidia are able to maintain the heterocaryon state of the mycelium and the progeny phenotype is the output of the interaction between the genetically different nuclei. Anyway, with this last type of conidia (multinucleate or multicellular) you can check the nuclei composition of the conidiogenous cell. If the conidiogenous cell is mononucleate, all nuclei present in each conidium (even in different cells of the same conidium) are identical (this apply to some Fusarium and we verify this for an isolate of Trichoderma virens) and you can use the whole conidium to generate a homocaryotic colony.
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