‼️FUNGUS ID REVEALED‼️ 26 days ago the mysterious #PurplePastaSauce fungus arrived in Morgantown for identification. Chenxin Li, PhD (@chenxinli2.bsky.social) and I were equally curious to identify this stranger than fiction spiky purple cat butt morphotype that was discovered growing on the lid of a

Mycena has superstrange genomes: a big expansion but no WGD, up to 97k genes. Some gene influx from ascomycetes by HGT. Most novel genes are conserved. Great collaboration with Francis M. Martin Joint Genome Institute Mate.Viragh Håvard Kauserud 🇺🇦 🇵🇸 Christoffer Harder Cover Cell Genomics shorturl.at/fhwPm BRC Biochem

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…

How can pangenomes help us understand the diversity and virulence of human fungal pathogens? What are the challenges to their widespread implementation? Check out our thoughts on these questions in our latest article, out now in PLOS Pathogens! doi.org/10.1371/journa…

Lab day out with the groups of Matthew G. Blango and Slavica Janevska at the archery parcour! 🏹 Some of us are excellent archers 🎯 , while others (me) are lucky we have other talents that keep us employed. 😅

Exciting news🤩- we have an opening for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Infection Biology & Immunology in our Institute EPFL Life Sciences EPFL Please spread the word & encourage outstanding postdocs, who are ready to start their own labs, to apply. THX 🤓 shorturl.at/bSvVe

To understand where patients acquire Aspergillus fumigatus isolates causing disease, we used a genomic epidemiology approach with Dutch Aspergillus fumigatus isolates from patients as well as agricultural hotspots of azole R. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Our new paper PLOS Biology. We analyzed chemotropism of fungal hyphae to C, N and pH by microfluidic control. Hyphae determine the growth direction in a two-layer flow with distinct compositions that were adjacent but non-mixing. They prefer acid pH. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar…

I am super excited that one of the most interesting finding in my lab was published in Nature Microbiology !! Have you heard about the fungus that helps carnivorous plants digest insects? 🐜🍃

How could patients on antifungal prophylaxis still get infected by “susceptible” fungal strains? We try to crack this puzzle with a 5-year patient and mycobiome dataset from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and 219 fungal genomes from three continents. 1/n nature.com/articles/s4159…

It’s been great working with Jacqueline Peña on Footprints of human migration in the population structure of wild wine yeast! biorxiv.org/content/10.110… .. A quick summary 🧵:

Our latest work on gene duplication and the evolution of heteromeric proteins from homomeric ones is out today in Science Magazine! Led by former lab member Philippe Després! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Open PhD positions in the lab: nature.com/naturecareers/… Email for more infos.

DIAMOND2GO for rapid GO assignment and enrichment testing twtr.to/7kwXU