Delighted to have been invited to write this mBio mGem @asm.org Here, I present a summary of the zymocin-like toxin research space. I also put forward my hypothesis that these toxins have been used for hundreds of millions of years across the fungal kingdom 🍄💀: journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

mGem: Toxins from killer plasmids as a universal killing system in the fungal kingdom | mBio

Fungal species compete with each other and with other organisms for nutrients, and one of the mechanisms that fungi often use to give themselves an advantage is the production of a toxin (1). Some tox...

journals.asm.org

It's out! Please give it a read, especially if you love virus and virus-like element evolution 🙏

Genome Biology and Evolution@genomebiolevol.bsky.social · 4mo ago

@therealpdogue.bsky.social , Salzberg & Wolfe find evidence that virus-like elements were present in the common ancestor of all terrestrial fungi, and that they were already subdivided into killer and helper types by this time. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/... #societyjournal #genome #evolution

Happy to share the final story from my thesis, demonstrating that the common ancestor of all terrestrial fungi had zymocin-like killer plasmids, a toxin system found in some budding yeasts. Come with me on an all-too-familiar, database dumpster-diving journey (1/10) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Zymocin-like killer plasmids were present in the common ancestor of terrestrial fungi

Some budding yeasts secrete killer toxins made by linear dsDNA plasmids located in the cytosol. The best-known example is the Kluyveromyces lactis toxin zymocin, which is encoded by a 9-kb killer plas...

biorxiv.org

New preprint from lab adding to recent interest in yeast centromeres. There are dramatic changes in structure, but location is conserved www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Centromeres in budding yeasts are conserved in chromosomal location but not in structure.

The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has ‘point’ centromeres, which are much smaller and simpler than centromeres of most other eukaryotes and have a defined DNA sequence. Other yeast taxa have ...

biorxiv.org

Hey! Are you at Beijing #SMBE 2025? Looking for something to do at 10:20 on Thursday? Come to my talk in Symposium 35 to hear about toxins in Fungi