Valentine’s Week is the perfect time to zero in on the Mating Type Loci in Psilocybe cubensis.
Psilocybe is believed to have 4 mating types (tetra polar) and they won’t grow near each other if they are not compatible. This is a pheromone affect. So where is this in the genome?
One hint revealed itself as we were mapping p.envy HiC reads to the new p.envy reference genome. While these genomes share a strain name, they are from spores from different providers. Spores should multiple mating types.
Why does Chromosome 1 have 10x more variation?
So we mapped more genomes and looked at SNP density across the chromosomes and Bingo!
Mating loci is on chromosome1:1867316-1871950
You will find
MAB11_COPCI mating-type protein beta1-1
And
MAAY4_SCHCO Mating-type protein A-alpha Y4
Steve McLaughlin gets credit for finding it.
This is the Coverage map in IGV over the Mating Type Loci. Lots of polymorphisms flanking the two genes in strains closely related to the reference genome.
More Distant strains have no reads mapping to this region. Suggests alternative mating types.
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