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 [...]
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 [...]
By Jason Stajich, on July 2nd, 2009
The Tremella mesenterica genome portal is live on the JGI site. Tremella is a Basidiomycete jelly fungus and an interesting study system from the perspective of discovery of novel lignin degrading enzymes. It also occupies an interesting phylogenetic position being an outgroup to the human pathogenic yeast Cryptococcus neoformans and C. [...]
By Jason Stajich, on March 16th, 2009
In preparation for Asilomar, JGI is releasing lots of the genome sequencing project portals. The Schizophyllum commune Genome Portal is now publicly available. Go get your white-rot gene investigation on! (Though please respect the community rules for 1st rights to publication of the genome-wide [...]
By Jason Stajich, on March 12th, 2009
An avid reader pointed out that I was not entirely thorough in describing that we don’t enough about the V8 agar media that is used to induce mating in Cryptococcus. In fact a great deal of work on mating in this fungus had focused on identifying what pathways are induced by V8 agar that [...]
By Jason Stajich, on February 5th, 2009
Postia placenta genome is now published in early edition of PNAS. Brown rotting fungi are import part of the cellulose degrading ecology of the forest as well (hopefully) providing some enzymes that will help in the ligin to biofuels process. Brown rotters cannot break down lignin while white rotters (like the previously sequenced Phanerochaete chrysosporium). This fungus was chosen for sequencing as it is another potentially helpful fungus in the war on sugars (turning them into fuels) including recently published Trichoderma reesei and 1st basidiomycete genome Phanerochaete (all incidentally with the Diego Martinez as first author – go Diego!). [...]
By Jason Stajich, on January 21st, 2009
The Broad Institute in collaboration with many of the Coprinopsis cinereus (Coprinus cinerea) community of researchers have updated the genome annotation for C. cinereus with additional gene calls based on ESTs and improved gene callers. The annotation was made on the 13 chromosome assembly produced by work by SEMO fungal biology group and collaborators across [...]
By Jason Stajich, on December 14th, 2008
A paper in IJSEM describes a new species in the Cryptococcus basidiomycete yeast lineage. The name is proposed as Cryptococcus keelungensis sp. nov. for a strain isolated from the sea surface microlayer. Its identity as a Cryptococcus sp was determined by sequencing of 26S rDNA D1/D2 and ITS loci and molecular phylogenetics. This is quite diverged from the human pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans and C. gattii as the new species falls in the order Filobasidiales while C. neoformans is classified in the order Tremellales. Interestingly, based on the phylogeny in the paper it seems to be relatively close to newly discovered Cryptococcus [...]
By Jason Stajich, on December 9th, 2008
A new and improved annotation of Cryptococcus neoformans var grubii strain H99 (serotype A) has been made available in GenBank and the Broad Institute website. This update is collaboration between several groups providing data and analyses and the annotation team at Broad’s gene calling [...]
By Jason Stajich, on December 4th, 2008
The Scientist has an article about airborne opportunistic fungal infections and interviewing several Cryptococcus researchers including Karen Bartlett and James Fraser.
The Encyclopedia of Life website has an article about the Mushroom Observer blog and the opportunity for more volunteers to curate organism pages at EOL.
NY Times article on how bark beetle are spreading fungi and [...]