New funding, new papers, new data

We celebrated a few events in April and May. - A new NSF grant was funded and started in April on rumen fungi ”Phylogenomics and evolutionary history of the anaerobic fungal group, Neocallimastigomycota”. This is a collaboration with Noha Youssef and Mostafa Elshahed at Oklahoma State University and will give the opportunity to work on systematics of these anaerobic gut fungi.

• Raúl Castanera who came to the lab for a short stay last year, authored a paper that was accepted this week on transposable elements in the Pleurotus (oyster mushroom) genome and comparisons in proliferation rates and impact on gene expression. Castanera R et al. PLoS Gen doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1006108
• We just started to get our first microbial diversity (16S and ITS) results for rock and soil communities from California desert environments and Antarctica as part of project by visiting student Claudia Coleine and Nat Pombubpa. Claudia is a PhD student with Laura Selbmann of Tuscia University and visited for nine months, but we processed isolates the lab collected from Antartica expeditions. We are also sequencing genomes of a handful of cultured fungal species from Antarctic locations and the first assemblies look pretty good (200-400 contigs for these 25-40Mb genomes) for a MiSeq only assembly.
• Nat is collecting samples from Joshua Tree National Park and in collaboration with other desert crust researchers Paul De Ley and Nicole Pietrasiak examining fungal and bacterial distribution.