The Hyphal Tip: Fungal Genomes and Comparative Genomics

The NY Times has an article on the high rate of Coccidioides incidence at the state prison in Pleasant Valley, California. The infection rate has been documented by Pappagianis et al in an in-depth study of Coccidioidomycosis in the California state prisons. The disease has stalled some plans for constructing a new prison the edge of the San Joaquin Valley so the state

Suzanne Leal wrote a very touching tribute in PLoS Genetics to Marcy Speer who passed away this summer.  Marcy was one of the reasons I went to grad school at Duke and was a wonderfully generous and brilliant scientist, mother, and friend.  I had the great opportunity to know her both when I worked at the CHG during and after college (where she would later become the

I've paraphrased an email sent by David Carter to folks interested in Saccharomyces resequencing project. The latest version of the SGRP data is on the web site and ftp site. This release is somewhat provisional, and motivated more by the fact that we have a paper deadline coming up than by any claim to finality. It should be quite

The Willi Hennig Society, homebase for all good cladists, has subsidized the license fee for TNT so that it is now a freely available program (although it is not open-source). TNT implements phylogenetic analysis under parsimony with a fast tree searching algorithm. I believe TNT was one of the software

Careful eating those old noodles left in the fridge, lots of fungi probably have made a home in the starch rich environment. But can food be inoculated with some inherent antifungal properties to help it last longer. A recent paper in the Intl Journal of Food Microbiology "Fungistatic activity of flaxseed in potato dextrose agar and

I'm excited about our projects to tackle the evolution of the Onygenales fungi. I just remembered to look and see what was going on with the Blastomyces genome sequencing at WashU.  I checked and the Blastomyces dermatitidis genome sequence assembly version 3 was released in October 2007 and ESTs via 454 and ABI technologies are all available from WUSTL Genome Sequencing Center. With the Broad Institute release this week of

Dave Hibbett wrote a great article for Mycological Research that describes the current state of systematics and evolutionary studies of morphology in mushroom-forming Agaricomycete fungi. His article, dedicated to the late, great mycologist Orson K Miller, Jr and entitled "After the gold rush, or before the flood? Evolutionary morphology of mushroom-forming fungi (Agaricomycetes) in the early 21st century" describes the how classification and systematics has changed in the last two hundred years and macromorphology to the more than "108,000 nucleotide sequences of ‘homobasidiomycetes’, filed under 7300 unique names."

The article contains some beautiful pictures many of which are taken from some of the eminent mycological photographers and mycologists Michael Wood and Taylor Lockwood.