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“Week of the Fungi” on Small Things Considered

The excellent microbiology blog Small Things Considered is celebrating the beginning of mushroom collecting season with a weeks worth of fungal posts. So far, they have discussed identifying poisonous mushrooms AFTER cooking them using real-time PCR, how wood-rotting fungi might actually improve the sound of your favorite stringed instrument, and the toxins found in the some of the deadly species of [...]

Will you always be able to satisfy that chocolate craving?

Crinipellis_perniciosa_mushroomNPR had a story this weekend on Cocoa plantation collapse and the ecological aftermath of the changes the witches’ broom fungus [[Moniliophthora perniciosa]] has wreaked. The genome sequence project for this Homobasidiomycete fungus is [...]

Dioxin cleanup with fungi

Pleurotus

NYT article on the work of Paul Stamets using fungi like Pleurotus for Dioxin cleanup in Ft Bragg, CA.

Thanks for the link 

Evolutionary morphology of mushroom-forming fungi

Blogging about Peer-Reviewed ResearchDave 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.

Fungal Genetics 2007 details

I’m including a recapping as many of the talks as I remember. There were 6 concurrent sessions each afternoon so you have to miss a lot of talks. The conference was bursting at the seams as it was- at least 140 people had to be turned away beyond the 750 who attended.

If there was any theme in the conference it was “Hey we are all using these genome [...]