The Hyphal Tip

Alan Muskat raps about mushrooms in “A Fist Full of Mushrooms” (small) (large)
- From the Bay Area Mycological Society website

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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!).

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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.

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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. 

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

Thanks for the link Pat!

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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