Fungal Evolutionary Genomics » people

A sendoff for the lab visitor

Jason Stajich — Thu, 27 May 2010 00:21:39 +0000

We bid farewell last weekend to our lab visitor, Nastassa Gioti, who is headed back to Sweden after 6 fun weeks in Riverside. We learned from her, and she got to dig into her genome datasets for Neurospora in the context of the comparative and genome annotation tools we have, so it was fun all around!

This also marked the second get together (but the first where we remembered to bring a camera). Since we gathered at a local mexican restaurant with whimsical and amazing sculptures and art from recycled material, it was fitting we document it with pictures.

Fusarium mobile chromosomes

Jason Stajich — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:51:26 +0000

Congrats to graduate student Divya Sain a co-author on a paper published in Nature on mobile chromosomes in Fusarium, stemming from her work her work during a rotation in the Borkovich laboratory.

The work highlights the important aspect of how pathogenicity factors can be exchanged via mobile chromosomes and can be an important pathway for adaptive evolution and acquisition of new function through whole chromosome exchange between strains.

Lab news for January

Jason Stajich — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 07:22:16 +0000

A quick January update. Jason was appointed to a two year term as Councilor for Genetics/Molecular Biology for the Mycological Society of America, began a term on the editorial board of Eukaryotic Cell, and was also profiled in the GSA reporter. Finishing grants and working towards completing manuscripts from postdoc-land while we are computing results on from genome and RNA-Seq datasets. Working to getting our laboratory production up and running to generate more of our data.

Currently the lab is four strong with 3 graduate students. They are Divya Sain and Yi (Zoe) Zhou who have joined for the long haul of doing a PhD in the GGB program, and Yizhou Wang, a rotation student from Plant Biology. Divya is working on a project that uses bioinformatics and phylogenetics to reconstruct history of the genes involved in the fungal cell wall across the fungi. Zoe is using bioinformatics and phylogenetics to focus on duplicated gene evolution and is exploring other aspects of duplication in fungal genomes. Yizhou will be getting going in the laboratory learning how to grow Neurospora and preparing some RNA extractions for some transcriptomics and RT-PCR validation.

In February John Abramyan will join us as a postdoctoral scholar to work on some molecular biology and genomics work on at least two fungi along with applying bioinformatic analyses of these data.

I also setup the Gbrowse2 for Sordaria and Coprinopsis, worked on some new template themes for the blogs, and we setup a bioinformatics group website at UCR (which is still coming together). Hoping the rest of Jan and Feb will be clearing a few more to do things off the list and getting a chance to do a bit more research blogging on the Hyphal Tip.