too many months cooped up in the lab separates myself from why I went into biology in the first place. Nature and biodiversity is so incredible and there’s nothing like camping to ground myself in why I chose to be a biologist

If you weren't at the Cellular and Molecular Fungal Biology Gordon Research Conference, I hope this helps you decide to go next time. It's such a great community! starring @grantnickles.bsky.social cinematography by @emmascales.bsky.social

Anna Lehmann, PhD candidate working in the Heitman Lab, found Aspergillus fumigatus can briefly duplicate chromosomes to survive antifungal treatment, then revert without a trace. https://medschool.duke.edu/news/phd-candidate-discovers-hidden-way-fungal-pathogen-may-resist-treatment

PhD candidate discovers a hidden way that a fungal pathogen may resist treatment

Some fungal pathogens survive antifungal drugs by mutating.

medschool.duke.edu

🍄 New study on #fungal #isocyanide synthases (#ICSs)! With @grantnickles.bsky.social @kellerlab.bsky.social (Uni. Wisconsin-Madison) @currentbiology.bsky.social @unipd.bsky.social Thanks all for the great teamwork! doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.… #Lichens #SecondaryMetabolism #biosyntheticGenes #fungi

What is the origin of South Africa's invading #mushrooms? The 'fly agaric' is the famous red-and-white-spotted mushroom of fairy tales. But like all good stories, this fairy tale has a dark twist: the mushroom is invasive on multiple continents, including in Africa. youtu.be/ILLT154Byw0 🧵1/3

What is the origin of South Africa's invading mushrooms?

The 'fly agaric' is the famous red-and-white-spotted mushroom of fairy tales. But like all good stories, this fairy tale has a dark twist: the mushroom is invasive on multiple continents, including…

youtu.be

What an honor and privilege to organize #fungal26 with the one and only Meritxell Riquelme! Thank you fungal community and @genetics-gsa.bsky.social for making this such a great meeting !

What a way to end #fungal26 We laughed and we cried and we learned so much A great reminder to look back and reflect on the past It can light the way to the future Thank you Nancy Keller for being a light 🕯️ in the field

Our new paper on the evolution and chemical ecology of the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria; aka the Super Mario mushroom 🍄) in the Global South is out now in New Phytologist. Read the full paper here: nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... 🧵 1/5

Equipped for success: genomes and metabolomes of the European Amanita muscaria are conserved in its novel South African range

Plants and soils have been moved around the world for centuries, but invasive mushrooms receive scant attention. The Amanita muscaria species complex was introduced to South Africa in the context of...

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Do you work with the Aspergillus fumigatus model isolates Af293 or CEA10? If so, we want to collaborate with you! In return for your lab's participation we will sequence your strain for free and provide co-authorship on the final paper. Learn more here: asp-fumi-seq-project-2025.vercel.app

(1/x) Yesterday will go down as one of the most monumental of my life.

Flight attendant: Is there a doctor on the plane? Me: Yes, but I'm not that kind of… Flight attendant: The pilots want to know about marine CO₂ removal and its role as a climate solution. Me: AT LAST!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... new preprint on predicting antifungal drug resistance in yeasts is out!

Hello friends and colleagues! I'm giving my public defense on May 28th from 10-11am CST. Zoom link: uwmadison.zoom.us/j/99000991657 I'll be talking about the three different first-author papers from my PhD. For sneak previews of those chapters scroll down for the thread! 👇

New publication with the Huttenlocher Lab! Led by PhD candidate Nayanna Mercado Soto, we used zebrafish to study burn wound infections with Candida albicans & Aspergillus fumigatus, showing the innate immune response is highly conserved across fungal species. #fungi journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Larval zebrafish burn wound infection model reveals conserved innate immune responses against diverse pathogenic fungi | mBio

Secondary fungal infections within burn wound injuries are a significant problem that delays wound healing and increases the risk of patient mortality. Currently, little is known about how fungi colon...

journals.asm.org

How it feels being a Wisconsin Susan Crawford voter waiting for the election results

Excited to share that work from my PhD is now available in @natmetabolism.bsky.social! Here, we uncover a link between heme production, BCAA metabolism, and thermogenesis—implicating heme synthesis in #aging, #obesity, and #T2D. Link to paper: urldefense.com/v3/__https:/... A Thread (1/15)

Haem biosynthesis regulates BCAA catabolism and thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue

Nature Metabolism - Inhibition of haem synthesis is shown to lead to the accumulation of branched-chain amino acids in the brown adipose tissue of mice, which reduces UCP1 levels and impairs...

urldefense.com

To the PIs that take the time to find grad students at conferences with posters, you are appreciated!! Hearing someone else get amped about my work reminds me why I do science 🥰

I’m in San Diego for the SIMB Natural Product Discovery and Development in the Genomic Era conference. Excited to hear about the research going on in other labs and to make new connections :)

Never a doubt in my mind that Charli was taking it this year

Online @cellpress.bsky.social, we reveal a protein shell that helps diatoms fix 20% of global #CO2 🧪🌊🌾🧶🧬🌍 Shimakawa et al: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Nam et al: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... @biozentrum.bsky.social press release: www.biozentrum.unibas.ch/news/detail/... Read on for more... 1/🧵

It’s crazy that 90% of the R&D bioinformatics jobs I’m seeing now require ML and AI development expertise while simultaneously advanced PhDs in biology or data science. If I had to guess only 5-10% of PhD level bioinformaticians actually know how to make advanced ML models.

We did this crazy project where we tried to see if proteins could interact with their mirror image ligand. Seems impossible when proteins need to form 3D structures to interact. But what about if the interaction remains disordered??? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Stereochemistry in the disorder–order continuum of protein interactions - Nature

Studies on protein–protein interactions using proteins containing d- or l-amino acids show that stereoselectivity of binding varies with the degree of disorder within the complex.

nature.com

It’s out!! We subjected soils from 30 different locations across Europe to extreme events and found that soil fungal and bacterial communities showed consistent responses that could be predicted from their origin! With @knightjar.bsky.social and many collaborators! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Soil microbiomes show consistent and predictable responses to extreme events - Nature

Soils from 30 grasslands across Europe were subjected to 4 contrasting extreme climatic events under drought, flood, freezing and heat conditions, with the results suggesting that soil microbiomes fro...

nature.com

Sure this will be super useful going forward for benchmarking and discovery 'MassSpecGym is the largest publicly available dataset of high-quality labeled MS/MS spectra' arxiv.org/html/2410.23...

If you are new to 🦋 and are interested in microbial natural products - here’s some starter packs to help connect us go.bsky.app/72NeGsT and go.bsky.app/4xnRN52 - there’s also one set up by @danudwary.secondarymetabolism.com here go.bsky.app/Q9svkYf

Hi 🦋! My name is Grant Nickles, 5th year PhD student studying fungal natural products in the Keller lab @ UW-Madison. More specifically, I've been developing genome mining strategies to investigate poorly characterized non-canonical fungal pathways. academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Mining for a new class of fungal natural products: the evolution, diversity, and distribution of isocyanide synthase biosynthetic gene clusters

Abstract. The products of non-canonical isocyanide synthase (ICS) biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) mediate pathogenesis, microbial competition, and metal-

academic.oup.com

If you've ever wondered why most new housing in America looks like the image on the left, rather than being more interesting and architecturally diverse like the building on the right, I have one explanation: single stair building codes 🧵

Pretending I have my year in review with these monthly stats.fm summaries. Charlie is taking my top artist of 2024 I fear

48% is SO high 😭. God I don’t envy climate and public health scientists over the next 4 years. They’re science policies strongest soldiers

David Shiffman, Ph.D. 🦈@whysharksmatter.bsky.social · 2y ago

Good news, everyone, the recent Pew poll has resolved this longstanding debate once and for all. 🧪

There are natural products, and there are natural-ish products:

Natural-Ish Product Motifs

science.org