#Fungal24 Colletorichum tofieldiae is usually a beneficial, growth promoting symbiont in Arabidopsis roots, but some strains can switch to being pathogenic. Kei Hiruma (晝間敬） has identified the regulatory pathways involved in the switch from friend to foe. nature.com/articles/s4146…

Elated to share that this January, I’ll be opening the doors to the Lofgren Mycology Laboratory at Berkeley in the Berkeley Plant & Microbial Biology dep. Our group will work on the ecology and evolution of fungi and their hosts, with a focus on ectomycorrhizal symbiosis, metabolism, and genomics.

Join us! 🌊🍄🌍🌏🌎 Tiny in size, these diverse fungi punch above their weight in ecological importance.

SO EXCITED to announce a new #NSFfunded workshop series co-lead by myself and @vgwschutte: half bioinformatics data visualization, half science communication - we're calling it "Telling Stories Through Data". Apply now to join us on Sapelo Island in August bit.ly/TSTD2024

New preprint from Cassie Ettinger, PhD (and me). Phoronids and their tubes harbor distinct microbiomes compared to surrounding sediment biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

🚨I will be hiring two postdoctoral scholars to start early 2025 at our new lab at UC Berkeley🚨 If you are attending MSA in Toronto next week and want to chat about either of these positions, please contact me! 🌱🍄 📄Details & application instructions: static1.squarespace.com/static/5679c5c…

Natural experiments, like the closure of the Isthmus of Panamá, can reveal the fascinating mechanisms of bacterial evolution. Our new paper shows how horizontal gene transfer helped chemosynthetic symbionts survive in the Caribbean Sea after this event. journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/a…

Monday, July 1 - Monthly Monday Meeting with Mark Yacoub 2022 Recipient of UC Riverside Microbiology Award for Excellence in Mycology Casa del Prado RM 101 Balboa Park 6:45pm Identification 7:00pm Presentation and Q&A Open to the public

If you want to talk about microbial eukaryotes, come to my poster this afternoon to hear about using metagenomics to learn more about marine fungi 🌊🍄 #LAMG2024

Our lab is organizing the Bay Area Population Genomics conference at @ University of California, Berkeley, led by Postdoc Xing Wu Where: Bakar BioEnginuity Hub When: November 8 Register/apply for a talk/poster until Oct 1: forms.gle/XphGBFSKZh22KX…! Web sites.google.com/view/bapg2024b…

Evolutionary tradeoffs in cheese? 🧀DocTara🇦🇬 added phage to a model cheese community and saw that phage resistant bacteria are then killed by fungi! Shows how complex life is in even “simple”communities, and the importance of studying biology/evolution in a community context!

Does anyone have an example of a fungal symbiont converging on a similar GC content to its host over time?

📢 You are invited to contribute to STREAMS: a set of community-consensus reporting guidelines for environmental microbiome studies! Read more about our workshop: zenodo.org/records/138296… and provide feedback by 10/14: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI… Reach out to us for more information!

If you work with metagenomes (or metatranscriptomes), would like to explore what viruses/phages are in your datasets, but don't know where to start, we have (an) MVP for you now \o/ Really happy to see this one published, and also welcoming feedback/suggestion of improvement!

Today is the last day to provide feedback on Version 1 of the STREAMS microbiome guidelines! Add your comments directly to the spreadsheet or to the Google Form (info below) along with your authorship information. Version 2 will also be distributed for community feedback!

A genomic resource for exploring bacterial-viral dynamics in seagrass ecosystems biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_micrbio

Genomic streamlining of seagrass-associated Colletotrichum sp. may be related to its adaptation to a marine monocot host biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_micrbio

Assessing the Evolutionary Trajectory of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Conserved Genes in Seagrasses and Aquatic Close Relatives biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_evobio

Eukaryotic MAGs recovered from deep metagenomic sequencing of the seagrass, Zostera marina, include a novel chytrid in the order Lobulomycetales biorxiv.org/content/10.110…