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Abstract
The fungal vacuole is an organelle, which adopts pleiotropic morphologies and functions. In aging and starving hyphae it is the compartment of degradation and recycling of cellular constituents. Here we identified TSP3, one of three tetraspanins present in the filamentous ascomycete fungus Neurospora crassa, as a vacuolar membrane protein. The protein is detected only in aging and starving cultures and under other conditions, which induce autophagy, such as vegetative incompatibility or the presence of the macrolide antibiotic rapamycin. Mutant analysis revealed that TSP3 is dispensable for growth and development of the fungus under laboratory conditions. Together these findings indicate that tsp3 shares characteristics with idi (induced during incompatibility) genes and might promote vacuolar functions related to autophagy.
Acknowledgments
We thank Chaoguang Tian for sharing information on unpublished RNA seq data and Louise Glass for providing strains for the incompatibility assays. We thank Ralf Schnabel and Christian Hennig for their continuous support in developing and optimizing our microscopy set-ups. This work was partially supported by grant FL706-2 from the German Research Foundation to AF. We greatly acknowledge use of materials generated by PO1 GM068087 Functional analysis of a model filamentous fungus.