The Microbial Biochemistry Group has a wide experience in the study of fungal development. Focusing on asexual development, two are our main research lines. On one hand, we use molecular biology tools for the study of factors that regulate morphological transitions within the fungal colony. On the other hand, we aim to isolate, identify and characterize novel endogenous compounds involved in the regulation of fungal development.

In a work published in 2002, we characterized the conidiogenone, an endogenous diterpene from Penicillium cyclopium that signals the emergence of vegetative hyphae to the air environment, activating the generation of asexual spores (Roncal et al., 2002). In 2003, we began with the study of Aspergillus nidulans development, since it is a worldwide used model due to its ease of manipulation at laboratory scale and its evolutionary relationship with economically important fungi as Aspergillus fumigatus or Aspergillus oryzae. We have described that endogenous bicarbonate levels control the growth of A. nidulans colonies (Rodríguez-Urra et al., 2009). Recently, our group described that conidiation in A. nidulans requires the coordinated activity of an adduct formed by two metabolites: dehydroaustinol and diorcinol (Rodríguez-Urra et al., 2012).

Using molecular biology tools, we aim to characterize the factors and understand the molecular mechanisms through which Aspergillus nidulans conidiation is activated and controlled. We focus mainly on FlbB and FlbE, the former being a bZIP type transcription factor located at the tip of vegetative hyphae, and the latter being required to provide FlbB with such a characteristic subcellular localization (Etxebeste et al., 2008; Etxebeste et al., 2009a eta 2009b; Garzia et al., 2009; Harris, 2009; Garzia et al., 2010). Both proteins have been proposed to participate in a sensor mechanism that senses environmental conditions and transduces these cues to nuclei, where FlbB activates, jointly with the c-myb type transcription factor FlbD, asexual reproduction (Garzia et al., 2010). We also participated in the characterization of other factors acting at this induction level, as FlbC, a C2H2-type zinc finger transcription factor (Kwon et al., 2010) or GmcA, an oxidoreductase required for conidiation under specific growth conditions (Etxebeste et al., 2012). This year we expect the publication of two papers that used an RNA-sequencing approach to elucidate the transcriptional modifications that occur upon induction of conidiation (Garzia et al., 2013) or the transcriptional changes caused by the absence of FlbB (Garzia et al., under review).

The knowledge generated on these fields allowed us to sign an agreement with the recently founded company Biofungitek S. L. for the isolation and characterization of endogenous compounds that control growth and morphogenesis in a diverse array of pathogens. We strongly believe that this strategy will further the development of new, more efficient and environmentally-friendly antifungal products.