The Hyphal Tip

A paper (Park et al, BMC Genomics) from Fungal Bioinformatics Lab at Seoul University in South Korea describes their new “Fungal P450 Database”. The database contains sequence, names, and genome links for P450’s (or Cytochrome P450s) identified by similarity and phylogenetic classification from genome annotations.

Mike Challen has summarized discussion at two recent conferences regarding a Basidiomycete Research Network at his blog in a post on BRN - Summary of Discussions, 14/07/08.

In particular it is important to establish a community network that will help basidiomycete labs. There is also a strong need for shared approaches for effective use the genomic data from the more than a dozen basidiomycete genomes currently being sequenced.

Just finished attending Genetics and Cell Biology of Basidiomycetes in Cape Girardeau, MO which was an intimate gathering of basidiomycetaphiles.  I learned about systems that are used for studying fruiting body development, genetic mapping, pheromone and mating genes, kinesin dynamics, meoitic gene regulation, and a host of topics.  I’m happy I got a chance to meet more folks in the community and learned about where informatics is needed

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

Thanks for the link Pat!

Jennifer from the other end of the lab just showed me the Rhizoctonia solani genome project page at JCVI.  Another Basidiomycete genome on the way, yah!

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 sequences”.