As reported in the journal Plant Disease, a recent collaboration between National Library of Medicine’s NCBI and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) analyzed public sequence records for the fungal genus Colletotrichum, an important group of fungal plant pathogens that are a significant threat to food production. Colletotrichum species … Continue reading Fungal species identification using DNA: a NCBI and USDA-APHIS collaboration with a focus on Colletotrichum→
This post is in support of the CDC’s Fungal Disease Awareness Week — September 20-24, 2021. The impact of fungal diseases on human health has often been neglected, but increased association of fungal infections with severe illness and death during the COVID-19 pandemic has brought fungal diseases into the spotlight. According to the CDC, the … Continue reading Fungal Disease Awareness Week: fungal pathogen data and literature at NCBI→
The headlines called it “incredibly condescending” (Alexandra Petri, ComPost), “unrealistic” (Jia Tolentino, Jezebel), and “bonkers” (Olga Khazan and Julie Beck, The Atlantic.) The post from the aptly named Brandy Zadrozny at The Daily Beast) was
Editors-in-Chief Kasturi Haldar and Grant McFadden highlight 10 years of PLOS Pathogens research in celebration of past accomplishments and future endeavors. As PLOS Pathogens turns 10, we are excited to assemble a collection of primary research articles that reflects the … Continue reading »
This post is geared toward fungi researchers as well as RefSeq and BLAST users. Fungi have unique characteristics that can make it difficult to identify and classify species based on morphology. To address these issues, Conrad Schoch, NCBI’s fungi taxonomist, … Continue reading →
Taking you behind the scenes and into the laboratory of the Citizen Science Soil Collection Program This is a guest post by Dr Robert H. Cichewicz a professor at the University of Oklahoma and leader of the Citizen Science Soil Collection Program. … Continue reading »
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Dr Robert H. Cichewicz. Director of the University of Oklahoma, Institute for Natural Products Applications and Research Technologies (INPART). Dr Cichewicz leads the Citizen Science Soil Collection Program which is focused on translating natural products into … Continue reading »
OK this is pretty cool (from a microbe-art-science point of view): An Artist Who Paints Portraits With Mold | WIRED. Seung-Hwan Oh "had to set up a micro-fungus farm in his studio" and he puts film in a warm wet environment (note to self - there could be a new human microbiome aspect of this project depending on what warm wet environment is chosen) and sometimes seeds the system with some mold. And then he lets nature do its work.
See more about his Impermanence works here. (Really - check out the works - they are wild).
At that site the work is described in the following way:
The visual result of the symbiosis between film matter and organic matter is the conceptual origin of this body of work. The process involves the cultivation of emulsion consuming microbes on a visual environment created through portraits and a physical environment composed of developed film immersed in water. As the microbes consume light-sensitive chemical over the course of months or years, the silver halides destabilize, obfuscating the legibility of foreground, background, and scale. This creates an aesthetic of entangled creation and destruction that inevitably is ephemeral, and results in complete disintegration of the film so that it can only be delicately digitized before it is consumed.
Also see his Tumbl page where one can find many other images like this one:
Hat tip to Kate Scow for posting about this on Facebook.
Well, am teaching three lectures this week on Fungal Diversity for BIS002C at UC Davis. And I decided tonight to ask the internet for help finding cool new stories on fungi. And boy did the internet come through in the clutch. Thanks internet. See Storification of Twitter and Facebook discussions below:
The headlines called it “incredibly condescending” (Alexandra Petri, ComPost), “unrealistic” (Jia Tolentino, Jezebel), and “bonkers” (Olga Khazan and Julie Beck, The Atlantic.) The post from the aptly named Brandy Zadrozny at The Daily Beast) was
