The Hyphal Tip

In a letter to the editor to the journal Nature, regarding the recently discovered/induced sexual stage in Aspergillus fumigatus, David Hawksworth argues that using the separate names for sexual (teleomorph) and asexual (anamorph) stages is confusing and unnecessary in this context.  The name Neosartorya fumigata is given to the sexual stage which was produced from two [...]

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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 analyses).

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The deadline for application to the Medical Mycology course held in the summer at Woods Hole is April 1st. This is a great hands-on course for practical laboratory techniques with medically relevant fungi. I am including an email from the course directors below.

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So this is actually old-ish news, but I saw this press release about paper published last year describing the ability of the fungus Gliocladium roseum to naturally synthesizes diesel compounds. The paper from Gary Strobel @Montana State and collaborators describes that G. roseum produces volatile hydrocarbon on cellulose media. Extracts from the host plant (Eucryphia [...]

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I cheered the Sanger-Wellcome SGRP group work to generate multiple Saccharomyces cerevisiae and S. paradoxus strain genome sequences. They submitted a version of the manuscript to Nature precedings and it is now published in Nature AOP showing that submitting to a preprint server doesn’t necessarily hurt your manuscript getting published in this instance. The research groups explored the impact of domestication (as was also recently done for the sake and soy sauce worker fungus, Aspergillus oryzae) on the Saccharomyces genome by comparing individuals from wild strains of S. paradoxus.

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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 himalayensis.

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A manuscript at Nature AOP details the success of the Dyer lab and collaborators in encouraging [[Aspergillus fumigatus]] to complete the sexual cycle under observable (e.g. laboratory) conditions. The authors are the teleomorph (sexual or perfect) stage [[Neosartorya fumigata]] for a fungus that had been previously only had an observed anamorphic stage. A. fumigatus can reproduce asexually forming structures called [[conidiophores]] which produce asexual spores called [[conidiospores]] (or mitospores as they are produced via mitosis) define the anamorph or imperfect stage, but no sexual structures such as [[cleistothecia]] that produce the packaged sexual products as [[ascospores]]. See a presentation by David Geiser (archived at the Aspergillus website) for more detail on some of the morphological and phylogenetic characters that unify the group of Eurotiales fungi.

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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 [...]

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Genome Technology highlights the very cool thing about next-gen sequencing – it puts the power in the hands of the researchers to explore genome sequence and doesn’t limit them to projects only funded through sequencing centers. The Genome Technology piece highlights work at Duke to sequence the genome Cladonia grayi, a lichenized fungus, with 454 technology at Duke’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy through their next-gen sequencing program.

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A Brevia piece in Science today describes efforts to describe the causal agent in white-nose syndrome (WNS) in bats which appears to be contributing to bat decline. According to the authors, previous work had described an uncharacterized fungus associated with bats that showed signs of being sick with WNS.

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