<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>Fungal phytopathogens continue to cause major economic impact, either directly, through crop losses, or due to the costs of fungicide application. Attempts to understand
these organisms are hampered by a lack of fungal genome sequence data. A
need exists, however, to develop specific bioinformatics tools to collate and analyse the
sequence data that currently is available. A web-accessible gene discovery database
(http://cogeme.ex.ac.uk/biosynthesis.html) was developed as a demonstration tool for
the analysis of metabolic and signal transduction pathways in pathogenic fungi using
incomplete gene inventories. Using Bayesian probability to analyse the currently available
gene information from pathogenic fungi, we provide evidence that the obligate
pathogen <italic>Blumeria graminis</italic> possesses all amino acid biosynthetic pathways found
in free-living fungi, such as <italic>Saccharomyces cerevisiae</italic>. Phylogenetic analysis was also
used to deduce a gene history of succinate-semialdehyde dehydrogenase, an enzyme
in the glutamate and lysine biosynthesis pathways. The database provides a tool and
methodology to researchers to direct experimentation towards predicting pathway
conservation in pathogenic microorganisms.</p>
[]
Comp Funct Genomics. 2003 Feb; 4(1):4-15