Fusarium graminearum is an important plant pathogen that causes head blight of 
major cereal crops. The fungus produces mycotoxins that are harmful to animal 
and human. In this study, a systematic analysis of 17 phenotypes of the mutants 
in 657 Fusarium graminearum genes encoding putative transcription factors (TFs) 
resulted in a database of over 11,000 phenotypes (phenome). This database 
provides comprehensive insights into how this cereal pathogen of global 
significance regulates traits important for growth, development, stress 
response, pathogenesis, and toxin production and how transcriptional regulations 
of these traits are interconnected. In-depth analysis of TFs involved in sexual 
development revealed that mutations causing defects in perithecia development 
frequently affect multiple other phenotypes, and the TFs associated with sexual 
development tend to be highly conserved in the fungal kingdom. Besides providing 
many new insights into understanding the function of F. graminearum TFs, this 
mutant library and phenome will be a valuable resource for characterizing the 
gene expression network in this fungus and serve as a reference for studying how 
different fungi have evolved to control various cellular processes at the 
transcriptional level.