parasitica belongs to the class of SAHH with an enzymatic characteristics typical of Michaelis–Menten equation (Fig. 1). We further showed that disruption of sahh gene resulted in a significantly increased intracellular accumulation of SAH in the mutants (Fig. 5b), providing evidence that sahh gene indeed is solely responsible for conversion of SAH to ADO and HCY in vivo. It has been reported that SAHH inhibition results in decreased apical dominance, altered leaf and flower symmetry, flower whorl malformations, and reduced fertility in tobacco plants, and a molecular feature accompanying these changes is the hypomethylation

of the genome DNA (Tanaka et al., 1997; Fulneček et al., 2011). As shown in this work, deletion of sahh resulted in slower growth rate, fewer aerial hyphae, loss of orange pigment, absence of asexual fruiting bodies, and conidia in C. parasitica (Fig. 2). High-performance liquid chromatography Opaganib analysis revealed that levels

of several small-molecule metabolites were substantially lower in mutants than in the parental strain CP80 (Fig. 5a and b). Identification of these small molecules may help to establish whether a change in the intracellular SAH/SAM ratio in the Δsahh mutant would affect other aspects of cellular metabolism of the chestnut blight fungus. It has been proposed that changing in concentration ratio of intracellular SAH/SAM is a mechanism to regulate SAM-dependent methyltransfer reactions and genomic DNA methylation reactions in the cell (Kloor & Osswald, Talazoparib manufacturer 2004; Yu et al., 2009). Accumulation of SAH caused by inhibition of SAHH activity had been shown to increase the concentration ratio of SAH/SAM to inhibit SAM-dependent methyltransfer reactions and consequently lead to a global decrease in DNA methylation reactions (Tanaka et al., 1997; Fulneček et al., 2011). DNA methylation is involved in the regulation of gene expression, cell differentiation, and organism’s development (Penyalver et al., 2009; Banas et al., 2011).

Activation of genes has been ascribed to the demethylation of critical mCpG (cytosine-guanine dinucleotide) loci, and silencing of certain genes may be related to the methylation of specific CpG loci (Chiang et al., 1996). In the present study, we found that deletion of sahh significantly increased PLEKHM2 intracellular ratio of SAH/SAM (Fig. 5) and a higher accumulation of transcripts of key components of the methylation pathway, such as those encoding Ak, MAT, and OMT (Fig. 4b). The elevated level of these transcripts may promote the demethylation of CpG loci (Hiroki et al., 1997; Singh & Gupta, 2004; Mill et al., 2006). It has been shown that perturbation of the heterotrimeric G-protein signaling pathway by hypovirus results in hypovirulence in C. parasitica (Choi et al., 1995; Chen et al., 1996; Kasahara & Nuss, 1997). Chen et al. (2011) reported that a hypovirus-regulated cyclophilin, CypA, was required for full virulence in C. parasitica.