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By Jason Stajich, on February 8th, 2010
 An article in PLoS Pathogens by Morris et al describe a hypothesis about the evolution and origins of plant pathogens applying the parallel theories to the emergence of medically relevant pathogens. The authors highlight the importance of understanding the evolution of organisms in the context of emerging pathogens like Puccinia Ug99 for our ability to design strategies to protect human health and food supplies. Both bacterial and fungal pathogens of plants are discussed but I (perhaps unsurprisingly) focus on the fungi here. Continue reading Origins and evolution of pathogens
By Jason Stajich, on February 4th, 2010
 I am excited to dig into the newly published Cellular and Molecular Biology of Filamentous Fungi edited by my next door neighbor Katherine Borkovich and Daniel Ebbole from Texas A&M which was recently published by ASM Press. The book is a comprehensive look at biology of filamentous fungi including ascomycetes and basidiomycetes and covers cellular biology and structure, metabolism, growth, organelles, photobiology, sexual and asexual development, and mutualistic and pathogenic interactions with plants & animals. I’ve yet to get my own yet but I’ve leafed through a copy and this looks to be an excellent reference for those wanting a review of current knowledge on many aspects of fungal biology and I anticipate important reading for new students and postdocs in the field.
By Jason Stajich, on January 28th, 2010
Registration for the 9th International Mycological Congress, held 1-6 of August, is now open. This looks to be an exciting, dynamic, and broad conference on fungal biology covering a great breadth of topics. These include: intricate look at fungal cell biology using microscopy, genetic and molecular biology tools; Evolution of fungi through systematics and comparative biology and new aspects of taxonomy; genetics and genomics of fungi; Studies of plant and animal pathogens. The meeting is only held every 5 years so I hope you can advantage of it! This year it will be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. The early registration is 5 February and you have until 9 April to submit abstracts.
Hope to see you there
By Jason Stajich, on January 25th, 2010
The cover of the Jan/Feb Mycologia has a picture of a pretty weird place to find a mushroom growing – a new species of mushroom that was found fruiting underwater in the Rogue river in Oregon. This was reported about two years ago for a discovery that was made in 2005, but this is a formal publication on the finding and species description of Psathyrella aquatica. It is quite cool to see discovery of a new habitat for mushrooms, but I expect some more work will be required to fully understand the mechanics and development dealing with the challenges of underwater growth. I think it would be interesting to see what kind of dispersal mechanisms there are since the spores are probably forced to float downstream, if there is an animal or wind dispersal mechanism at some later stage too or whether one finds mycelium growing in the soil near and around the rivers.
The important part of identifying the species and sequencing identifying molecular marker like ITS is that when later metagenomics studies of soil are performed, the anonymous sequenced clones can be matched up to know species, and we can identify where else this fungus is found.
Frank, J., Coffan, R., & Southworth, D. (2009). Aquatic gilled mushrooms: Psathyrella fruiting in the Rogue River in southern Oregon Mycologia, 102 (1), 93-107 DOI: 10.3852/07-190
By Jason Stajich, on January 22nd, 2010
Don’t forget to register for Neurospora 2010 held at the beautiful Asilomar Conference center in Pacific Grove, CA held April 8-11, 2010. Get your filamentous fungi fix here!
Also save the date for some other important upcoming conferences you may consider attending
- American Society of Microbiology, Candida and Dimorphic Fungi Meeting, March 22-26, Miami, FL, USA
- Joint Genome Institute, 2010 User Meeting, March 24-26, Walnut Creek, CA, USA
- New and emerging fungal diseases of animals and plants, April 17-21, Roscoff Biological Station (near Brest), Brittany, FRANCE
- American Society of Microbiology, 110th Annual Meeting, May 23-27, San Diego, CA, USA
- Cellular and Molecular Fungal Biology Gordon Conference, June 13-18, Holderness, NH, USA
- Mycological Society of America meeting, June 28-July 1, Lexington, KY, USA
- 9th International Mycological Congress, August 1-6, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Other evolutionary and genomics meetings
- Biology of Genomes, May 11-15, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA
- Evolution Meetings, June 25-29, Portland, OR, USA
- Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution, July 4-8, Lyon, FRANCE
- International Society of Computational Biology, ISMB2010, July (9-10) 11-13, Boston, MA, USA
By Jason Stajich, on January 12th, 2010
These papers got lost in my drafts of things to write about. Grants and overdue manuscripts are keeping me away from the blog.
- Published work from Gary Foster’s lab in Applied Env Micro show progress on genetic engineering tools to express introduced genes in the basidiomycete mushroom system Clitopilus passeckerianus. C. passeckarianus produces an antibiotic, pleuromutilin, an important antibiotic. Cover photo [Press] They also showed the 5′ intron is important for efficient expression, something that has been shown several times in fungi and provides more evidence for the role of introns in promoting or regulating an aspect of gene expression or translation. Perhaps by splicing-dependent export.
- Corradi et al – the genome of the microsporidia parasite of Daphnia (water flea). It’s as big as a fungal genome at 24Mb (S.cerevisiae is about 12Mb, Neurospora crassa about 40Mb) but only has about 2,100 genes (S.cerevisiae has ~6,000, N.crassa ~ 10,000). DOI: 10.1186/gb-2009-10-10-r106
By Jason Stajich, on December 30th, 2009
Holiday petri-art from Stephanie Mounaud at JCVI. [h/t] to Rob Cramer and Stephanie for sending along.
 2009 Eyes, Mouth, Buttons: Aspergillus niger Arms:A. nidulans Nose: A. terreus with Penicillium marneffei Body: Neosartorya fischeri  2008 Top: Talaromyces stipitatusTree: A. nidulans Ornaments: P. marneffei Trunk: A. terreus
By Jason Stajich, on December 14th, 2009
By Jason Stajich, on December 7th, 2009
 Announced today at the 10th Frontiers in Fungal Biology meeting in Ensenada, Baja California: In honor of his contributions to research in cell biology fungi, in particular the growth of hyphae in fungi, critical work supporting the characterization of the Spitzenkörper, development numerous approaches for microscopic and biochemical characterization of fungal cell walls, and uncovering molecular mechanisms for growth and morphogenesis in filamentous fungi, a named award will be established for Salomón Bartnicki-García, Director in the Department of Microbiology at CICESE and Professor Emertius at UC Riverside. He has been honored in the past upon his retirement from UCR in a special issue in Fungal Genetics and Biology and by the Mycological Society of America as a Distinguished Mycologist. He truly defined a field in fungal biology and is well deserving of a named award at MSA. It is fitting that the announcement was made during a meeting he co-organized in Ensenada and also on the 50th anniversary of his 1st publication (BARTNICKI-GARCIA S AND W. J. NICKERSON. The yeast-like form of Mucor rouxii. 1959; Abst. IX Intern. Botan. Congr. (Montreal), v. 2, p. 22.).
There is an ongoing collection for donations to found this award both in direct monetary gifts and through the sale of some fantastic calendars designs and T-shirts. I am not sure if the T-shirts and calendars will be available online at all, but I expect additional fund raising through MSA auction and other events will work to raise the necessary capital to endow this award. Contact Terry Hill and Meritxell Riquelme for more information or to make a contribution.
By Jason Stajich, on December 7th, 2009
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