Homothallism: an umbrella term for describing diverse sexual behaviours

Sexual reproduction is notoriously complex in fungi with species able to produce sexual progeny by utilizing a variety of different mechanisms. This is even more so for species employing multiple sexual strategies, which is a surprisingly common occurrence. While heterothallism is relatively well understood in terms of its physiological and molecular underpinnings, homothallism remains greatly understudied. This can be attributed to it involving numerous genetically distinct mechanisms that all result in self-fertility; including primary homothallism, pseudohomothallism, mating type switching, and unisexual reproduction. This review highlights the need to classify these homothallic mechanisms based on their molecular determinants and illustrates what is currently known about the multifaceted behaviours associated with homothallism.The University of Pretoria, the Department of Science and Technology (DST)/National Research Foundation (NRF) Centre of Excellence in Tree Health Biotechnology and the Genomics Research Institute (University of Pretoria Institutional Research Theme) as well grants from the National Research Foundation of South Africa (including Grant specific unique reference number (UID) 83924).http://www.imafungus.orgam201

Dual RNA-seq of pathogen and host

A comprehensive understanding of host–pathogen interactions requires a knowledge of the associated gene expression changes in both the pathogen and the host. Traditional, probe-dependent approaches using microarrays or reverse transcription PCR typically require the pathogen and host cells to be physically separated before gene expression analysis. However, the development of the probe-independent RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) approach has begun to revolutionize transcriptomics. Here, we assess the feasibility of taking transcriptomics one step further by performing 'dual RNA-seq', in which gene expression changes in both the pathogen and the host are analysed simultaneously