By Jason Stajich, on September 30th, 2008
BBC news and GTO report the sequence of P. chrysogenum, will be published in October in Nat Biotechnology in a project based at the biotech company DSM. P. chrysogenum being the mold that fortuitously contaminated Dr Fleming’s bacterial plates.
The 13,500 reported genes in the press release is quite bit larger than relatives in the [...]
By Jason Stajich, on June 3rd, 2008
We’re excited that a Penicillium marneffei grant to Mat Fisher and collaborators has been funded by the Welcome Trust. It includes a collaboration with University College London, our lab, JCVI, and Univ of Melbourne. This project will explore functional and comparative genomics approaches to studying the [...]
By Jason Stajich, on March 23rd, 2008
A paper in Current Genetics describes the discovery of Repeat Induced Polymorphism (RIP) in two Euriotiales fungi. RIP has been extensively studied in Neurospora crassa and has been identified in other Sordariomycete fungi Magnaporthe, Fusiarium. This is not the first Aspergillus species to have RIP described as it was demonstrated in the biotech workhorse Aspergillus oryzae. However, I think this study is the first to describe RIP in a putatively asexual fungus. The evidence for RIP is only found in transposon sequences in the Aspergillus and Penicillium. A really interesting aspect of this discovery is RIP is thought to only occur during sexual stage, but a sexual state has never been observed for these fungi. [...]
By Jason Stajich, on December 17th, 2007
Careful eating those old noodles left in the fridge, lots of fungi probably have made a home in the starch rich environment. But can food be inoculated with some inherent antifungal properties to help it last longer. A recent paper in the Intl Journal of Food Microbiology “Fungistatic activity of flaxseed in potato dextrose agar [...]
