Emile Gluck-Thaler

Do fungal Starships 🚀 matter for human health? We dive into the pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus and connect the dots between these unusual transposons and strain variability. Spoiler alert: biofilms, secondary metabolites and intra-strain variation, oh my! biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh…

Lesson 1: Plant pathogens are in constant coevolutionary conflict with their hosts Lesson 2: Plant pathogen genomes are highly diverse Lesson 3: Plant pathogen genomes are non-randomly organised Lesson 4: Diverse mechanisms drive genomic diversity in plant-pathogen populations

Fungal genomes are 🤯🤯🤯 We wrote this review to summarise some lessons we learned in the last 20 years of fungal genomics. Excited to see where our field is going in the next 20 years to come! Thanks a lot to all co-authors @YuSengHuang @ThorstenLangner and Sophia 🧵👇

Dive into the massive genomes of plant pathogenic rust fungi! 🌿🍄 Our study reveals how ancestral & recent bursts of transposition have shaped these remarkable genomes. 👏 Congrats to @Emma______C on her 1st PhD paper! 🙌 @SebbyRust, Emmanuelle Morin biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Excited to share the published version of our paper: Thermal Adaptation in Worldwide Collections of a Major Fungal Pathogen 🌍🔥 Congrats to @MinanaPosada and @AliceFeurtey for leading this great work! 🎉 Read it here: apsjournals.apsnet.org/doi/10.1094/MP…

have you ever gazed out at some fungus and wondered what else could be in there?✨ Check out our new @TrendsGenetics review on fungal #Starships 101: what we know so far and where we think the field is headed. Great job Andrew and @Hulk_Vogan 🍄🚀 authors.elsevier.com/a/1jnz5cQbJBL8h

NEW publication out in @NatureMicrobiol!🥳 The conidial surfaceome (surface proteins) of #Aspergillus fumigatus contains unique proteins absent in non-pathogenic relatives. KOs revealed 33 genes affect #pathogenesis and related traits, indicating the surfaceome impacts virulence

Zach Konkel built CLOCI to detect gene clusters based on the signatures of their evolutionary processes. Not just secondary metabolite clusters...all kinds of clusters. And of course we present fun new horizontal gene cluster transfers. academic.oup.com/nar/advance-ar…

Come join us! Our institute @LeibnizHKI is looking for a Post-Doc who will work on therapeutic microbes with the perspective to establish an own research group! Please spread the word 📣 jobs.hki-jena.de/jobs/Postdocto…

@mgblango No hints yet, but we really don't know much about how captain expression is regulated

Do fungal Starships 🚀 matter for human health? We dive into the pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus and connect the dots between these unusual transposons and strain variability. Spoiler alert: biofilms, secondary metabolites and intra-strain variation, oh my! biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh…

@AbigailLLind thanks Abby! hope all is well

@mycomile Cool work Emile!

Thanks to @adrian_forsythe Charlie Puerner @hyphaltip @danielcroll Robb Cramer and @Hulk_Vogan for a great team effort 🤩🥳🙌

Just did a podcast with @mycomile and Horacio Lopez-Nicora. Really cool stuff! We discussed massive mobile elements (starships) and what role they might be playing in fungal genomes: sites.libsyn.com/416264/s3e27-b… @CropNetwork @ncipmc @OSUPlantPath @UWMadisonExt @dsmuelle @alabamaED @travisfaske @swhitham49 @MartinChilvers1 @badgercropdoc @DTelenko @DylanMangel @tjcksn @febina_m @baldpathologist @UtaMcKelvy @MizzouIPM @KStateRE @PlantPathISU @ISU_IPM @alisonrISU @ImperfectFunGuy @cropdoc08 @cropdisease @AlbertTenuta @yrkandel @ISUcropscout @phytopoetry @plantdisease @ISUCropNews @ISUExtension

@LotusLofgren @PMB_Berkeley Congrats Lotus, way to go!!

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

FBR has just published our commentary that we have compiled on suggestion of the editors. This will hopefully help to clarify why the search for complex plant metabolites in cultures of fungal endophytes is not an attractive research goal but more related to phantom hunting.

Bringing Starships 🚀 to the people: our new workflow for finding giant transposons is out! We used starfish on a kingdom wide 🍄database and found 100s of Starships in 100s of species.. and that's just scratching the surface: doi.org/10.1093/nar/gk… @Hulk_Vogan

NEW preprint: #PhyKIT is a command-line tool for analyzing multiple sequence alignments and phylogenies. Here, we detail #protocols for using PhyKIT to build #phylogenomic supermatrices, quantifying biases/#errors therein, identifying putative radiations & so much more.

Phylogenomics of 710 fungal genomes from the biomedically and technologically important genus Aspergillus reveal that ~8% are misidentified - population-level sampling is important. @jlsteenwyk @JosHoubraken @RokasLab & many amazing collaborators journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/sp…

I have debated if/how to share this, because this paper is both exciting but also the hardest I have ever written because of *waves hands in all directions*. It also would NOT be in-print without two amazing Masters students @ahbucknell and Hannah Wilson who did the work 1/2

@jessiemacalpine @CowenLab alum bringing home a post doc poster award at #Fungal24!! 🍄🎉 Congrats to Jessie and all the other winners!!