A few years ago, A. gossypii became recognized as an attractive model to study 
the growth of long and multinucleated fungal cells (hyphae) because of its small 
genome, haploid nuclei, and efficient gene targeting methods. It is generally 
assumed that a better understanding of filamentous fungal growth will greatly 
stimulate the development of novel fungicides. The use of Ashbya gossypii as a 
model is particularly promising because of the high level of gene order 
conservation (synteny) between the genomes of A. gossypii and the yeast 
Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Thus, a similar set of genes seems to control the 
surprisingly different growth modes of these two organisms, which predicts that 
orthologous growth control genes might not play identical cellular roles in both 
systems. Analyzing the phenotypes of A. gossypii mutants lacking factors with 
known functions in yeast morphogenesis and nuclear dynamics confirm this 
hypothesis. Comparative genomics of both organisms also reveals rare examples of 
differences in the gene sets for some cellular processes, which as shown for 
phosphate homeostasis can be associated with differences in control levels.