Alan Muskat raps about mushrooms in “A Fist Full of Mushrooms” (small) (large)
- From the Bay Area Mycological Society website
Do you need more Mushroom rap in your life?
Posted on June 13th, 2009 by Jason Stajich · No Comments
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: fun, funny, mushroom
Please be sure of your mushroom’s identity before eating
Posted on January 6th, 2009 by Jason Stajich · No Comments
SFChronicle has an article on musroom poisining over this holiday season. Please be sure of what you are have found before eating. Waiting for that spore print is worth it when in doubt (at all!).
Categories: news
Tags: eating, identification, mushroom, poisoning
Agaricus genomic resources
Posted on September 26th, 2008 by Jason Stajich · No Comments
Mike Challen asks for anyone with Agaricus bisporus ESTs, BAC data, or mapping information to send them in the direction of the JGI to aid in the assembly and annotation of this mushroom genome.
Categories: Agaricomycota · fungi
Tags: agaricus, EST, genome, mushroom
Will mushrooms save the world?
Posted on May 12th, 2008 by Jason Stajich · 1 Comment
Paul Stamets thinks so and he’s done work to make this happen. The founder of FungiPerfecti and author many books on mushroom cultivation spoke at a TED talk recently that is worth taking a look.
Categories: bioremediation · fungi · news
Tags: bioremediation, cleanup, fungi, fungiperfecti, mushroom, pleurotus, stamets, TED talk
Dioxin cleanup with fungi
Posted on May 1st, 2008 by Jason Stajich · 1 Comment

NYT article on the work of Paul Stamets using fungi like Pleurotus for Dioxin cleanup in Ft Bragg, CA.
Thanks for the link Pat!
Categories: bioremediation · fungi · homobasidiomycota
Tags: basidiomycete, bioremediation, cleanup, mushroom, pleurotus
Comparing development
Posted on February 17th, 2008 by Jason Stajich · No Comments
PZ Meyers has a post summarizing of an older paper from Elliot Meyerowitz (2002) that comapares plant and animal development. In particular there is are some major themes summarized about how plants and animals form patterns and cell to cell signaling as part of development. What’s missing is what we’ve learned about within group comparisons where there are multiple lineages of single-celled and multicelled
Categories: comparative · evolution · genome
Tags: animals, comparative, mushroom, plants, systematics
Phytopathogenic Fungi: what have we learned from genome sequences?
Posted on February 8th, 2008 by Jason Stajich · No Comments
A review in Plant Cell from Darren Soanes and colleagues summarizes some of the major findings about evolution of phytopathogenic fungi gleaned from genome sequencing highlighting 12 fungi and 2 oomycetes. By mapping evolution of genes identified as virulence factors as well as genes that appear to have similar patterns of diversification, we can hope to derive some principals about how phytopathogenic fungi have evolved from saprophyte ancestors.
Categories: comparative · dothideomycetes · euriotiomycetes · fusarium · magnaporthe · phylogeny · plant pathogen · secondary metabolite
Tags: filamentous, fungi, gene, gene duplication, genes, genome, gpcr, maps, multicellularity, mushroom, NRPS, pathogen, pathogens, phylogeny, phytopathogenic fungi, PKS, sequencing, systematics
Sex in fungi: MAT locus cloned from a Zygomycete
Posted on January 13th, 2008 by Jason Stajich · 1 Comment
On the cover of this week’s Nature is a picture of Phycomyces blakesleeanus
highlighting the discovery of the MAT locus in this Zygomycete fungus from Alex Idnurm and Joe Heitman and colleagues. While it was previously known that Zygomycetes (the Orange lineage represented by R. oryzae in the tree below) mate, the specific locus has until now, never been discovered. The authors in this study identified the MAT locus through a sequence search looking for HMG-box genes knowing that these are found the Mating Type locus in Basidiomycetes and Ascomycetes. They confirmed the identity through a through set of experiments that included PCR, sequencing and crosses of (+) and (-) strains of P. blakesleeanus, and Southern blots.
Categories: basidiomycota · bioinformatics · comparative · evolution · functional · recombination · sexual reproduction · zygomycete
Tags: MAT, mating locus, mushroom, sex, sex chromosome, sexual development, systematics, zygomycota
Willi Hennig Superstar
Posted on December 19th, 2007 by Jason Stajich · No Comments
The Willi Hennig Society, homebase for all good cladists, has subsidized the license fee for TNT so that it is now a freely available program (although it is not open-source). TNT implements phylogenetic analysis under parsimony with a fast tree searching algorithm. I believe TNT was one of the software
Categories: phylogenetics
Tags: mushroom, Parsimony, phylogenetics, systematics, TNT, Willi Hennig
Evolutionary morphology of mushroom-forming fungi
Posted on December 10th, 2007 by Jason Stajich · 3 Comments
Dave 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.
Categories: Agaricomycota · basidiomycota · homobasidiomycota
Tags: ancestral, comparative, evolution, fungi, morphology, mushroom, phylogenetics, reconstruction, systematics
