Essential letters in the fungal alphabet: ABC and MFS transporters and their roles in survival and pathogenicity

Abstract

Fungi depend heavily on their ability to exploit resources that may become available to them in their myriad of possible lifestyles. Whether this requires simple uptake of sugars as saprobes or competition for host-derived carbohydrates or peptides, fungi must rely on transporters that effectively allow the fungus to accumulate such nutrients from their environments. In other cases, fungi secrete compounds that facilitate their interactions with potential hosts and/or neutralize their competition. Finally, fungi that find themselves on the receiving end of insults, from hosts, competitors, or the overall environment are better served if they can get rid of such toxins or xenobiotics. In this chapter, we update studies on the most ubiquitous transporters, the ABC and MFS superfamilies. In addition, we discuss the importance of subsets of these proteins with particular relevance to plant pathogenic fungi. The availability of ever-increasing numbers of sequenced fungal genomes, combined with high-throughput methods for transcriptome analysis, provides insights previously inaccessible prior to the -omics era. As examples of such broader perspectives, we point to revelations about exploitive use of sugar transporters by plant pathogens, expansion of trichothecene efflux pumps in fungi that do not produce these mycotoxins, and the discovery of a fungal-specific oligopeptide transporter class that, so far, is overrepresented in the plant pathogenic fungi.

Keywords: ABC, MFS, sugar, and oligopeptide transporters; Efflux transporters; Fungal multidrug resistance; Pathogenic fungi.