Meiotic drive of female-inherited supernumerary chromosomes in a pathogenic fungus

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Abstract

Meiosis is a key cellular process of sexual reproduction involving the pairing of homologous sequences. In many species however, meiosis can also involve the segregation of supernumerary chromosomes, which can lack a homolog. How these unpaired chromosomes undergo meiosis is largely unknown. In this study we investigated chromosome segregation during meiosis in the haploid fungus Zymoseptoria tritici that possesses a large complement of supernumerary chromosomes. We used isogenic whole chromosome deletion strains to compare meiotic transmission of chromosomes when paired and unpaired. Unpaired chromosomes inherited from the male parent as well as paired supernumerary chromosomes in general showed Mendelian inheritance. In contrast, unpaired chromosomes inherited from the female parent showed non-Mendelian inheritance but were amplified and transmitted to all meiotic products. We concluded that the supernumerary chromosomes of Z. tritici show a meiotic drive and propose an additional feedback mechanism during meiosis which initiates amplification of unpaired female-inherited chromosomes.

Data availability

Sequencing reads have been deposited in the Sequence Read Archive and are available under the BioProject PRJNA438050. These datasets will be made public upon acceptance of manuscript. All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files (Supplementary Files 2-4). Source data files have been provided for Figures 2 and Figure 2—figure supplement 1.

The following data sets were generated

1. Habig
2. Michael
(2018) PRJNA438050
NCBI BioProject.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA438050

Article and author information

Author details

Michael Habig

Environmental Genomics, Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel, Ploen, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Gert Kema

Wageningen Plant Research, Wageningen UR, Wageningen, Netherlands

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-2732-6911
Eva Holtgrewe Stukenbrock

Environmental Genomics, Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel, Ploen, Germany

For correspondence
stukenbrock@evolbio.mpg.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-8590-3345

Funding

State of Schleswig Holstein

Eva Holtgrewe Stukenbrock

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Open-access funding)

Eva Holtgrewe Stukenbrock

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.