Fungal Evolutionary Genomics » research

PLoS Pathogens Pearl published

Jason Stajich — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:17:17 +0000

PLoS Pathogens has a short review format called Pearls. We were invited to write a short summary on Batrachochytrium which was published in the January issue.

Rosenblum, E., Voyles, J., Poorten, T., & Stajich, J. (2010). The Deadly Chytrid Fungus: A Story of an Emerging Pathogen PLoS Pathogens, 6 (1) DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1000550

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.

A primer on the Fungi

Jason Stajich — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:01:44 +0000

Our primer on the Fungi is available (currently free) on the Current Biology website. A version with extra refs inserted is available in pre-print format here. In this primer we provide a broad overview of the major evolutionary defined groups within Fungal kingdom. Our intention is make the kingdom a little less mysterious for non-mycologists and introduce some open areas of research that require integrating evolutionary, morphological, and molecular research. This was joint work with Mary Berbee, Meredith Blackwell, David Hibbett, Tim James, Joey Spatafora, & John Taylor.

Also thanks to several people for access to images: Jeffrey Rollins, Sabine Huhndorf, David McLaughlin & lab, George L Barron, Greg Jedd and Michelle Momany.