By Jason Stajich, on January 25th, 2010
The cover of the Jan/Feb Mycologia has a picture of a pretty weird place to find a mushroom growing – a new species of mushroom that was found fruiting underwater in the Rogue river in Oregon. This was reported about two years ago for a discovery that was made in 2005, but this is a [...]
By Jason Stajich, on January 12th, 2010
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 [...]
By Jason Stajich, on June 13th, 2009
Alan Muskat raps about mushrooms in “A Fist Full of Mushrooms” (small) (large)
- From the Bay Area Mycological Society website
By Jason Stajich, on January 6th, 2009
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 [...]
By Jason Stajich, on September 26th, 2008
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.
By Jason Stajich, on May 12th, 2008
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 [...]
By Jason Stajich, on May 1st, 2008

NYT article on the work of Paul Stamets using fungi like Pleurotus for Dioxin cleanup in Ft Bragg, CA.
Thanks for the link
By Jason Stajich, on February 17th, 2008
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 [...]
By Jason Stajich, on February 8th, 2008
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 [...]
By Jason Stajich, on January 13th, 2008
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 [...]