Genome sequencing and annotation of Cercospora sesami, a fungal pathogen causing leaf spot to Sesamum indicum

Abstract

Cercospora sesami is a plant pathogen that causes leaf spot disease in sesame plants worldwide. In this study, genome sequence assembly of C. sesami isolate Cers 52-10 (MCC 9069) was generated using native paired-end and mate-pair DNA sequencing based on the Illumina HiSeq 2500 platform. The genome assembly of C. sesami is 34.3 Mb in size with an N50 of 26,222 bp and an average GC content of 53.02%. A total number of 10,872 genes were predicted in this study, out of which 9,712 genes were functionally annotated. Genes assigned to carbohydrate-active enzyme classes were also identified during the study. A total of 80 putative effector candidates were predicted and functionally annotated. The C. sesami genome sequence is available at DDBJ/ENA/GenBank, and other associated information is submitted to Mendeley's data.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13205-023-03468-4.

Keywords: Cercospora leaf spot; Effectors; Gene annotation; Genome assembly; Plant pathogens; Sesame.

Fig. 1

Cercospora sesami (Isolate Cers 52–10; MCC 9069) on Sesamum indicum a–f, a Leaf spots on upper surface of leaf, b Symptoms on leaf after 12 days of inoculation, c Conidiophores fascicles on leaf surface, d Conidia, e–f Obverse and reverse side of colony grown on PDA after incubation for 12 days, Scale bars: c = 100 μm and d = 50 μm

Fig. 2

A neighbor-joining tree based on the concatenated alignment of sequence data of three loci, ITS (545 bp), LSU (1032 bp) and ACT (166 bp) showing phylogenetic affinities of sequenced Cercospora sesami (shown in bold) with other Cercospora species. Multiple sequence alignments were produced using Clustal Omega, and the phylogenetic tree was constructed using MEGA11. Zymoseptoria tritici (CBS 100329) was designated as outgroup. Bootstrap values obtained from 1000 replicates are shown at the nodes. The scale bar represents 0.02 nucleotide substitutions per site. (CBS Centraalbureau Voor Schimmelcultures, Utrecht, Netherlands; CPC Culture Collection of Pedro Crous; MCC Microbial Culture Collection, National Centre for Microbial Resource, National Centre for Cell Science, Pune, India)

Fig. 3

A heat map of the optimal pairwise distance matrix showing the significant correlation among 21 Cercospora genomes. The red color indicates the most likely related, and the blue color indicates the most divergently related genomes

Fig. 4

Gene ontology (GO) distribution of Cercospora sesami MCC 6069 genes under three main GO categories: Biological Process, Molecular Function and Cellular Component