Dr. Allen Gathmen and Dr. Walt Lilly

Years of fungal genetic research by two Southeast Missouri State University biology professors were featured on the cover of one of the world’s most influential science journals.

“Genome Evolution in Mushrooms” is the title of the article published in the June 30 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The article also features a guest commentary on the significance of the research by two scientists at the University of California Berkeley.

The journal article is the culmination of nearly six years of work by Dr. Allen Gathman and Dr. Walt Lilly, Southeast professors of biology, on the genome of the mushroom Coprinopsis cinerea.

Lilly and Gathman, along with more than a dozen Southeast students, have worked to assemble and characterize the genome sequence for a mushroom called Coprinopsis cinerea. Their work was funded by a $744, 055 grant they received from the National Science Foundation to collaborate on research with scientists at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The project was part of the Microbial Genome Sequencing Program of the National Science Foundation.

Gathman says the Southeast research group with its cadre of undergraduate researchers sequenced more than 6,000 gene transcripts from the organism and used those sequences to help define the structure of genes in the genome. In addition the Southeast team performed genome-level sequencing and computational biology to close the nearly 435 gaps in the original sequence to allow for assembly of the entire 30 million DNA bases into 13 chromosomes.