Beth L. Pritchard¹ , Jiujiang Yu² , William Nierman³ , Ralph A. Dean¹ , Deepak Bhatnagar² , T. E. Cleveland² , Gary A. Payne¹

¹  North Carolina State University, 840 Main Campus Dr., Raleigh, NC, 27695-7567, USA

²  USDA/ARS/SRRC, 1100 Robert E. Lee Blvd. New Orleans, LA, 70124, USA

³  The Institute for Genomic Research, 9712 Medical Center Dr., Rockville, MD, 20850, USA

Aspergillus flavus is a filamentous fungus that is pathogenic to plants and animals. It attacks several crop species and contaminates their seed with the carcinogen, aflatoxin. Aspergillus flavus is also is the second leading cause of aspergillosis in humans. A whole genome sequencing project funded by the USDA/NRI and USDA/ARS is nearing completion. Most of the 3X draft sequence, which was conducted at TIGR, consists of 17 scaffolds representing 2995 contigs. These scaffolds do not account for all of the sequence but represent 33.1 Mbp. Thus the genome of A. flavus appears to be larger than either A. nidulans or A. fumigatus. Manual annotation and sequence analysis of the genome is being coordinated through North Carolina State University and will be available at www. Aspergillusflavus.org. The available sequence will allow comparative genomics among several species within the genus Aspergillus whose sequences are now available.