We headed over to Lake Perris for a lab BBQ and fun afternoon in the sun. Here’s a few pictures of the group all together. 
back from Asilomar
Congrats to the lab for a great Fungal Genetics meeting. Everyone was participating in the meeting, presenting their work, and hearing about the new things coming out in other research laboratories. Was exhausting pace with 8AM to 10 PM (or later) every day but I think the fun and science excitement overshadowed the tiredness. Congratulations to Steven who won a poster prize and to Jason for his election to the Fungal Genetics Policy Committee. FungiDB was demoed in a workshop and poster sessions and we seemed to get a lot of interest and feedback along with the excellent presentation by Omar Harb from the EuPathDB team to lead the workshop.
We will post some pictures and upload our poster PDFs in the coming weeks I expect, still catching up on sleep and reengaging in our research after that.
Thanks to all who came by to talk with us at our posters and it was great fun to make new friends and reconnected with long-time ones.
Steven passes his quals
We had a little celebration to recognize Steven passing his qualifying exam this week.
Stajich Lab Wordles for 2012
Wordle/Tagxedo graphs from Pubmed2Wordle on all papers published from the lab
And here is the abstract wordle for the 2012 papers
Welcome back Anastasia!
We welcome back Anastasia Gioti to the lab visiting from Sweden by way of Greece. She has been to the lab for a a couple of two-month visits over the past three years working on genomics of Neurospora mating systems. Now she has returned this month as a visiting scholar to stay through the winter to continue our collaboration on evolution of mating systems, focusing on the genomic consequences of transitions in homothallic and heterothallic fungi. She gets to have a nice SoCal instead of a Swedish winter.
Lake Arrowhead talk videos
Talks from the Sloan Foundation sponsored session at Lake Arrowhead meeting on Microbiology of the Built Environment are now posted on Microbe.net (which was jokingly pronounced as micro-beignet by some) including my talk on fungi in the Built environment. Go take a look if you want to see an overview of some of the ways researchers are studying microbes in the built environment. The Microbe.net team also recorded an interview with me about our work on the MicroBE data coordinating center and work to make identifying fungi from metagenomic sequencing easier.
Jason on the Microbe.net blog
Check out a video of Jason answering questions about our project to build a database supporting identification of Fungi in the Microbiome of the Built Environment supported by the Sloan Foundation.
Andrii’s sendoff
Andrii has returned to Durham after a short stint in the lab to pick up some new skills and teach us more about culturing and major questions in Entomophthorales fungi. He did a nice writeup on his establishment of a copepod colony which we will use for our future attempt to get Coelomomyces colonies in the lab.
He has posted his farewell talk that spans a few of the projects he has been working on his website too -take a look here.
Welcome new team members
Welcome to Edward Liaw who will start working on FungiDB for the genome. Edward joins us after finishing a MS in Bioinformatics at UC Santa Cruz.
Also a welcome to Greg Gu who is joining us after working as a specialist in Plant Pathology. Greg is transitioning to bioinformatics to work on fungal identification from environmental sequencing using bioinformatics approaches and will support our work to build a database for ITS sequences as part of the Sloan project’s Microbiome of the Built Environment.
Divya awarded Guru Gobind Singh Fellowship
Congratulations to Divya who was awarded the Guru Gobind Singh Fellowship for 2012-13! This fellowship is awarded to one graduate student in the UC system who is a student of an Indian or Pakistani university and committed to returning to her country of origin after receiving her doctoral degree at a UC campus. This is a great honor and we’re all proud of Divya for applying for and receiving the award. An article in UCR Today describes her work and the award.