Dynamic Transcriptomic and Phosphoproteomic Analysis During Cell Wall Stress in Aspergillus nidulans

Authors

Cynthia Chelius, University of Maryland at Baltimore
Walker Huso, University of Maryland at Baltimore
Samantha Reese, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Alexander Doan, University of Maryland at Baltimore
Stephen Lincoln, University of Connecticut - Storrs
Kelsi Lawson, University of Maryland at Baltimore
Boa Tran, The U.S. Army CCDC Chemical Biological Center, BioSciences Division, Aberdeen Proving Ground
Raj Purohit, University of Maryland at Baltimore
Trevor Glaros, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Ranjan Srivastava, University of Connecticut - Storrs
Steven D. Harris, University of ManitobaFollow
Mark R. Marten, University of Maryland at Baltimore

ORCID IDs

Cynthia Chelius

Date of this Version

5-19-2020

Comments

CC-BY

Abstract

The fungal cell-wall integrity signaling (CWIS) pathway regulates cellular response to environmental stress to enable wall repair and resumption of normal growth. This complex, interconnected, pathway has been only partially characterized in filamentous fungi. To better understand the dynamic cellular response to wall perturbation, a-glucan synthase inhibitor (micafungin) was added to a growing A. nidulans shake-flask culture. From this flask, transcriptomic and phosphoproteomic data were acquired over 10 and 120 min, respectively. To differentiate statistically-significant dynamic behavior from noise, a multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) model was applied to both data sets. Over 1800 genes were dynamically expressed and over 700 phosphorylation sites had changing phosphorylation levels upon micafungin exposure. Twelve kinases had altered phosphorylation and phenotypic profiling of all non-essential kinase deletion mutants revealed putative connections between PrkA, Hk-8 –4, and Stk19 and the CWIS pathway. Our collective data implicate actin regulation, endocytosis, and septum formation as critical cellular processes responding to activation of the CWIS pathway, and connections between CWIS and calcium, HOG, and SIN signaling pathways.