The Hyphal Tip

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.