Supporting information of genome biology and evolution of mating type loci in four cereal rust fungi

Sex in animals and some plants is determined by sex chromosomes. In fungi, mate compatibility is determined by mating type (MAT) loci, which share some features with sex chromosomes including recombination suppression around heterozygous loci. Here, we study the MAT loci in fungal pathogens from the order Pucciniales, which cause rust diseases on many economically important plants, including wheat and oats. We show that one of the MAT loci is multiallelic, while the other is biallelic in most cases. The biallelic locus shows strong signs of recombination suppression and genetic deterioration with an increase in the number of transposable elements and gene deserts surrounding the locus. Our findings on the genome biology of MAT loci in four economically important pathogens will improve predictions on potential novel virulent isolates that can lead to large-scale pandemics in agriculture.

This dataset contains data related to the study, including data on geneological analysis, alignments of HD, Pra, STE3.2-1, and mfa genes, dS value matrices, TE annotation files, and other TE study-related data, and data related to RNA expression analysis.