Emile Gluck-Thaler

@mycomile.bsky.social

Understanding fungal interactions using genes, genomes and Starships 🧬🍄🚀Evolutionary Biologist and Asst Prof @UWMadison's Dept. of Plant Pathology | he/him | plantpath.wisc.edu/faculty/emile-gluck-thaler/

🚨 Washington State asked a judge yesterday to hold the Trump admin in contempt for canceling a grant to Seattle Children’s to study gender-affirming care. “Injunctions are not suggestions — they are binding orders of the Court. Defendants may not evade this Court’s orders through game-playing.”

Max Kozlov@maxkozlov.bsky.social · last yr.

NEW: The NIH has begun terminating grants for active projects studying gender identity, DEI, environmental justice, climate change, among other topics. At least 16 termination letters have already been sent — and hundreds more are coming, people inside NIH tell me. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

We show eukaryotic #HGT across >100 million years of evolution through simple co-culture: the fungal equivalent of taking yourself for a swim with a platypus and walking away with a new bill 🧪🍄🦆🚀 Great work everyone!

Aaron Vogan@fungage-lab.bsky.social · last yr.

We did it! We caught Starship #transposons moving between #fungal species in the lab, including between species separated by ~100my. We think Starships are a mediator of HGT in fungi, akin to conjugative elements in bacteria. Check out the preprint. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Illustration depicting the ways in which fungi can exchange genetic material with each other. Starship mediated HGT is confirmed experimentally in this preprint.

We are experiencing an assault on science unparalleled by anything I’ve seen in my life. It’s not one issue or another anymore, the entire institution is under attack by the most powerful individuals in the country. This Friday, where will you be? standupforscience2025.org

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE

March 7, 2025. Washington DC and nationwide. Because science is for everyone.

standupforscience2025.org

Stand Up for Science!@standupforscience.net · last yr.

Welcome to the Bluesky account for Stand Up for Science 2025! Keep an eye on this space for updates, event information, and ways to get involved. We can't wait to see everyone #standupforscience2025 on March 7th, both in DC and locations nationwide! #scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

Elon Musk has now illegally fired: - USDA employees amidst a bird flu outbreak - FAA chair amid a plane crash epidemic - People in charge of protecting us from nuclear attack At this point Musk has to be considered a terrorist attacking the United States.

@asm.org this better not be anticipatory obedience. I have 5 lab members planning on going to ASM microbe this year. I will absolutely pivot to another meeting if ASM gives in to anti-DEI efforts.

SShawna Reed@profpathogen.bsky.social · 2y ago

@vscooper.micropopbio.org and @mostlymicrobes.bsky.social while downloading scientist spotlights for teaching from the site; ASM has also scrubbed the entire IDEAA page including resources on LGBTQ+ scientists at asm.org/IDEAA/resources/pride-month

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! doi.org/10.1101/2024...

Giant transposons promote strain heterogeneity in a major fungal pathogen

bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

doi.org

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/...

Systematic identification of cargo-mobilizing genetic elements reveals new dimensions of eukaryotic diversity

Abstract. Cargo-mobilizing mobile elements (CMEs) are genetic entities that faithfully transpose diverse protein coding sequences. Although common in bacte

doi.org