Genome assemblies of three strains of Pyricularia oryzae, representative of the variability of the population on Italian rice

Despite recent population studies on Italian populations of Pyricularia oryzae, little information is available regarding their genomic structure and effector gene content. Here, we compared three representative Italian P. oryzae strains (ITC28, ITC35 and ITC82) with reference strain 70-15. This led to the identification of 1-2 Mb of new contigs with no match to the reference strain. Gene prediction performed on the contigs returned 894 genes, of which 19 encode proteins with effector characteristics. Among these candidates, protein FUN_000690-T1 matched the sequence of effector IUG6, which is associated with high virulence of strain 98-06. These data could be useful to better understand the molecular mechanism of pathogenicity in Italian strains and to provide targets for diagnostic tool development.