Abstract
The industrially important fungus Aspergillus niger is known to reproduce only asexually. The parasexual cycle of fungi can be used for crossing two different strains to produce segregants or progeny with combined mutations even in fungi without a known sexual cycle. In A. niger, the parasexual cycle has been extensively used to establish linkage groups and to generate genetic maps. With the advent of whole genome sequencing, the parasexual cycle has received renewed attention as a method to create segregants for bulk segregant analysis. Bulk segregant analysis is a genetic technique used to link and ultimately identify the mutation associated with a particular phenotype. In this chapter we describe the procedure for setting up parasexual crossings in A. niger. The segregants obtained with this method can be used in combination with next-generation sequencing to map mutations in the organism.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Felix Seelinger, Jing Niu, and Ebru Alazi for their help in developing the methods described in this chapter. We thank Fons Debets and Peter van der Vondervoort for helpful advice.
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Arentshorst, M., Ram, A.F.J. (2018). Parasexual Crossings for Bulk Segregant Analysis in Aspergillus niger to Facilitate Mutant Identification Via Whole Genome Sequencing. In: de Vries, R., Tsang, A., Grigoriev, I. (eds) Fungal Genomics. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1775. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7804-5_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7804-5_22
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