Evidence for the dispersal of a unique lineage from Asia to America and Africa in the sugarcane fungal pathogen Ustilago scitaminea.

The basidiomycete Ustilago scitaminea Sydow, which causes sugarcane smut disease, has been spreading throughout Africa and America since the 1940s. The genetic diversity and structure of different populations of this fungus worldwide was investigated using microsatellites. A total of 142 single-teliospore were isolated from 77 distinct whips (sori) collected in 15 countries worldwide. Mycelium culture derived from on generation of selfing of these single teliospores were analysed for their polymorphisms at 17 microsatellite loci. All these strains but one were homozygous at all loci, indicating that selfing is likely the predominant reproductive mode of U. scitaminea. The genetic diversity of either American or African U. scitaminea populations was found to be extremely low and all strains belong to a single lineage. This lineage was also found in some populations of Asia, where most U. scitaminea genetic diversity was detected, suggesting that this fungal species originated from this region. The strong founder effect observed in U. scitaminea African and American populations suggests that the fungus migrated from Asia to other continents on rare occasions through movement of infected plant material.

Survey in the sugarcane expressed sequence tag database (SUCEST) for simple sequence repeats.

Sugarcane microsatellites or simple sequence repeats (SSR) were developed in an economical and practical way by mining EST databases. A survey in the SUCEST (sugarcane EST) database revealed a total of 2005 clusters out of 43,141 containing SSRs. Of these, 8.2% were dinucleotide, 30.5% were trinucleotide, and 61.3% were tetranucleotide repeats. Except for dinucleotides, the CG-rich motif types were the most common. Differences in abundance of trinucleotide motif types were observed between EST-SSRs and those isolated from sugarcane genomic libraries. Among the different cDNA libraries used for EST sequencing, SSRs were more frequent in the ones derived from leaf roll (LR). Twenty-three out of 30 tested SSRs produced scorable polymorphisms in 18 sugarcane commercial clones. These EST-SSRs showed a moderate level of polymorphism with some SSRs producing unique fingerprints. The number of alleles observed among the 18 clones evaluated varied from 2 to 15, with an average of 6.04 alleles/locus. The polymorphism information content (PIC) values ranged from 0.28 to 0.90 with a mean of 0.66. The EST-SSRs screened over both parents (SP 80-180; SP 80-4966) and 6 F1 individuals produced 52 segregating markers that could potentially be used for sugarcane mapping. The EST-SSRs were found in clusters that had significant homology to proteins involved in important metabolic pathways such as sugar biosynthesis, proving that EST-SSRs are a valuable tool for the construction of a functional sugarcane map.