Transcriptome analysis of A. nidulans growing in different carbon sources. Aspergillus nidulans

Aspergillus nidulans is a model organism for aspergilli, an important group of filamentous fungi that encompasses human and plant pathogens, as well as industrial cell factories. Aspergilli have a highly diversified metabolism and both in connection with their biotechnological application as well as their interaction with other cells (humans or plants), it is valuable to understand how their metabolism is regulated. We therefore performed genome-wide transcription analysis of A. nidulans grown on three different carbon sources (glucose, glycerol, and ethanol) with the objective to identify global regulatory structures. We furthermore reconstructed the complete metabolic network of this organism, and this resulted in linking of 666 genes with metabolic functions, as well as assigning metabolic roles to 472 genes that had not been annotated earlier. Through combinations of the reconstructed metabolic network and the transcription data, we identified subnetwork structures that pointed to coordinated regulation of genes involved in many different parts of the metabolism. Keywords: carbon sources, metabolism, comparative genomics Overall design: Aspergillus was grown in three different carbon sources - glucose, ethanol and glycerol. Cultivations were run in triplicate, and each biological replicate was load on a different chip. Therefore, we analyzed nine arrays (3 carbon sources x 3 biological replicates).