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In bookstores now

I am excited to dig into the newly published Cellular and Molecular Biology of Filamentous Fungi edited by my next door neighbor Katherine Borkovich and Daniel Ebbole from Texas A&M which was recently published by ASM Press.  The book is a comprehensive look at biology of filamentous fungi including ascomycetes and basidiomycetes and covers cellular biology and [...]

a mushroom and a microsporidia walk into a bar

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 [...]

A cacophony of comparative genomics papers

A nice series of comparative genomics articles have been published in the last few weeks. The pace of genome sequencing has accelerated to the point that we have lots of sequencing projects coming from individual labs and small consortia not necessarily from genome centers. We are seeing a preview of what next (2nd) generation [...]

Sequencing wine spoilage yeast

There is an article in Wine Spectator (Seen on the JGI feed) on sequencing the wine spoilage yeast bruxellensis (correct name is now Dekkera bruxellensis) which adds the not-so-excellent taste of “sweaty horse” to wines.  There is already some survey sequencing done by Ken Wolfe and Jurge Piskur’s groups so a full genome sequencing project will [...]

Jelly fungus Tremella genome available at JGI

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. [...]

For your reading pleasure

Too much on my plate as of late, so I’m woefully behind on posting much on interesting papers or news.  Here’s a short list of links and papers that are worth a look though.

“Evolution of pathogenicity and sexual reproduction in eight Candida genomes” published (Nature)
NYT Science article sort of summarizing the good, bad, and ugly of fungi [...]

N.crassa lineage specific genes

Take a look at this post by Larry Moran on Takao Kasuga’s paper on phylogenetic distribution of genes in N. crassa genome. [...]

Schizophyllum genome portal live at JGI

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 [...]

Aspergillus has a posse

aspergillusposseShepard Fairley has gotten alot of notice lately for his Obama art that has been replicated pretty much everywhere. In homage to his earlier street art we’ll discuss the growing Aspergillus genome [...]

On the content of (petri plate) Media

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 [...]