A Draft Genome Resource for a Cacao Thread Blight Disease–Causing Strain of Paramarasmius palmivorus

Abstract

Thread blight disease (TBD) is an emerging foliar disease on cacao (Theobroma cacao), the source of chocolate. Multiple species of pathogenic fungi in the Marasmiinae suborder of Agaricales are responsible for causing TBD in cacao. A recent phylogenetic study showed that Marasmius palmivorus, the second most frequently isolated TBD-causing fungus in Ghana, was phylogenetically distinct from the Marasmiaceae genera Marasmius and Moniliophthora, leading to the naming of a new genus, Paramarasmius. The genus currently contains two species, the type species P. palmivorus and P. mesosporus. This report describes our release of a draft nuclear genome assembly and annotation of P. palmivorus strain GH-12 derived from long- and short-read sequencing. This high-quality draft is the first released genome for P. palmivorus and provides insight into the pathogenicity and evolution of an emerging pathogen. [Figure: see text] Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.

Keywords

• cacao
• fungal pathogens
• genomics
• Marasmiinae
• microbe-genome sequencing
• Paramarasmius