Dear Fellow Researchers,

We are writing to announce the availability at the FGSC of two new resources for Aspergillus nidulans research:

Deletion constructs have been generated at Dartmouth Medical School by Carol Ringelberg via funding from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences sponsored Program Project GM068087 of which Jay Dunlap is the principle investigator. The availability of these constructs will provide immediate impact to the research of many groups. Perhaps more importantly we hope to generate a permanent community wide resource by requiring deletion strains developed using the constructs to be deposited at the FGSC. To this end we are requesting that strains developed using the deletion constructs be deposited at the FGSC within one year of obtaining the constructs. A spreadsheet is available defining the primers used to generate the deletion constructs. In addition, primers are also available to amplify the constructs if necessary. Finally a picture of the purified construct DNA run on a gel is also available. The nutritional marker for selection of transformants is A. fumigatus pyrG. To cover the expenses incurred by the FGSC, the cost will be $2.00 per deletion construct, or primer pair, plus shipping. The ability to distribute constructs and primers is limited and we expect that people will respect the project and the FGSC by not making unreasonable demands and requests for constructs should be limited to those that will be used to generate knockout mutants immediately.

As part of the Program Project GM068087 the Osmani lab has also generated deletion strains of most A. nidulans protein kinase genes and the deletion strains have been deposited at the FGSC. The strains were generated using the deletion construct resource as described above. The recipient strain was SO451. Haploid strains containing deletion of non-essential kinase genes were confirmed via diagnostic PCR. These strains have been tested for phenotypes under various conditions as outlined in a spreadsheet also at the FGSC. The strains have not yet been out-crossed. For essential genes, heterokaryon rescue generated stable heterokaryons confirmed using diagnostic PCR. The heterokaryons are available from which the terminal phenotypes can be defined using spores generated from them.

We hope these resources will aid your research and ask that you reference Program Project grant GM068087 (PI Jay Dunlap) when publishing.

Steve Osmani and Colin De Souza. Ohio State University.

Jay Dunlap and Carol Ringelberg. Dartmouth Medical School.