I don’t know if you’ve heard, but bee colonies are disappearing! Colony collapse disorder, as this phenomenon is better known, worries bee-keepers, agriculturalists and insect admirers all over: over 25% of the commerical bee colonies have disappeared since last fall. Normally, when a commerical hive collapses, honey is left behind in the box and wild bees set up shop on top of this free resource. [...]
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Not fungal, but cool science nonetheless (plus, ants are important in some fungal symbioses). Walter R. Tschinkel uses plaster to study ant nests (particularly the Florida harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex badius) and his recent article in Bioone provides us an interesting insight into any colony morphology. Check it out.
A while back, Jason blogged briefly on a New Scientists article about the rise of a new Puccinia graminis strain, Ug99, that is spreading through West African wheat fields at an enormous rates. It looks like this story is growing in the scientific conciousness, as Science is now running an article on the spread of this wheat [...] CNN reports on a giant (25 ft tall) prehistoric fungus classified by C. Kevin Boyce and collegues. Also see U Chicago press release and Softpedia articles about the manuscript entitled Devonian landscape heterogeneity recorded by a giant fungus published in Geology describing the Prototaxites fossil. It has apparently been studied for quite a long time (150 years) to no [...] We got word last week from the JGI that our DNA for Neurospora tetrasperma and N. discreta have passed QC and library QC and are on their way to being sequenced. The center also plans to do some EST sequencing to improve gene calling abilities. Why more Neurospora genomes? The sequencing proposal discussed these species as a model system for evolutionary and ecological [...] We have also posted our presentations from Fungal Genetics 2007 on our site as well including John’s talk and mine. I am trying out slideshow.net to upload presentations.
The New Scientist has an article about the spread of black stem rust caused by Puccinia graminis. We briefly mentioned the 1st release of a Puccinia genome in January. Some more links about the spread of the Ug99 virulent strain.
I’ve never worked with Magnaporthe grisea, the fungus responsible for rice blast, one of the most devastating crop diseases, but I do know that its life cycle is complicated and that knocking out roughly 61% of the genes in the genome and evaluating the mutant phenotype to infer gene function is not trivial. In their recent letter to Nature, Jeon et al did what [...] |
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