Read: “Impacts of experimentally accelerated forest succession on belowground plant and fungal communities.”
May 18, 2018. Congratulations Imani Russell (MSc), for her successful defense on 4/25! Her thesis was entitled “Chytrid in the lowlands: widespread fungal infection across Amazonian frog clades suggests critical role for low elevation in pathogen spread and persistence”.
May 11, 2018. We are moving! New lab is down the road in the new Biological Sciences Building.
April 9, 2018. Congratulations to Anat Belasen for receiving Rackham Graduate School’s prestigious Predoctoral Fellowship. This award will support her dissertation year of intense writing and data analysis.
Dec. 15, 2017. Anat Belasen wins the honor of being the EEB department’s Photographer at Large for her cool photo of Aparasphenodon brunoi (Bruno’s cask-headed frog).
Nice job Anat!
Nov 20, 2017. Buck Castillo featured in article on the burn chronosequence at UMBS. 100+ years of post-fire succession has been established at the field station which is an excellent resource for research and teaching. Buck has been investigating the fate of fungal communities at multiple stages after burning.
Oct 19, 2017. Hello to Xiao-Yong Liu (red vest) visiting from the State Key Lab of Mycology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing for three months to work on Rhizopus arrhizus population genomics. Thanks and farewell to Gustavo Jerônimo-Alves and good luck with the dissertation!
July 24, 2017. Congratulations to Dr. Kevin Bakker, honorary Mycotic for defending his dissertation entitled “Exploring human birth seasonality and the environmental
mechanisms driving childhood disease dynamics”. Way to go! Kevin is working as a postdoc on rabies vaccination in Peru.
July 11, 2017. Congratulations to Dr. Thomas S. Jenkinson for successfully defending his dissertation entitled “Population Structure and Evolutionary Ecology of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest”. All that draggin’ paid off! Thomas is now a postdoc with Dr. Bree Rosenblum in Berkeley.
April 22, 2017. Welcome to Gustavo Jerônimo-Alves visiting from the Instituto de Botânica, São Paulo! Gustavo is a PhD student in mycology working on systematics of Brazilian chytrids using phylogenetic and ultrastructural methods.
April 20, 2017. Congratulations to Theresa Ong, honorary Mycotic and cherished collaborator and colleague on finishing successfully defending her thesis: “Biocomplexity: the autonomous agroecological alternative”. Theresa’s juggernaut of a thesis included genetic and fungal components, such as analysis of microsatellite locus variation in pea aphid across an urban landscape. Theresa is pictured below in center with her committee.
March 21, 2017. Four of us participated in the most excellent 29th Fungal Genetics Conference in Asilomar State Park, CA. This meeting was really stimulating and made us all excited to be a part of this community.
-Alisha presented on the mycobiomes of cone snails as well as her genome sequence of the Cryptomycotan Paramicrosporidium. She won a best poster award for postdocs!
-Kevin presented on the genome sequence and comparative analysis of the nematode trapper Stylopage hadra.
-Rob presented on methylation during dikaryon formation in mushrooms.
-Tim presented on mitotic recombination during experimentally evolving yeast populations.
Alisha with esteemed ecologist Lynne Boddy at her poster.
Kevin showing his culturing methods for Stylopage.
Rob chats with Jesper Svedburg from Uppsala University.
Yen-Ping Hsueh, Sheng Sun, and Tim enjoying the sunny weather.
March 6, 2017. Hail chytrids! Thomas Jenkinson received news of an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship award to work with Erica Bree Rosenblum in UC Berkeley. Moreover, Tommy was chosen for an Outstanding GSI Award from the Rackham Graduate School. Well done!
UM chytrid crew also welcomes new postdoc Dr. Rabern Simmons (pictured left). Rabern was a PhD student of Dr. Joyce Longcore (pictured below) who was visiting from U. Maine to help with multiple chytrid projects.
Sept. 20, 2016. Michigan Mycology hosts 42nd Annual AH Smith Foray at UMBS. Over 75 regional mycologists attended and 189 different fungal species were collected!
Sept. 2016. Two student papers on Bd published this year. Thomas Jenkinson's paper culminating 3+ field seasons of Bd sampling in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest published in Molecular Ecology with an accompanying highlight by Ghosh and Fisher. Clarisse Betancourt-Román and Colin O'Neil's paper on experimental infection of nematodes and crayfish was recently published in Parasitology.
May 15, 2016. Mycotics at Hartwick Pines State Park during lab retreat.
April 13, 2016. We are looking to fill a position in Cryptomycota genomics and are particularly interested in candidates with a passion for obscure fungi and using massive genomic data sets to address biological problems. Please email me (Tim James) for more information.
Feb. 22, 2016. Congratulations to Thomas Jenkinson for receiving his Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from NSF. "DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Evolutionary Consequences of Pathogen Strain Competition in an Emerging Fungal Disease."
Nov. 4, 2015. Welcome to new Ph.D. student Kevin Amses and new Research Technician Lucas Michelotti!
Aug. 31, 2015. Congratulations to Rob Powers for successfully defending his M.Sc. thesis entitled "Sexual selection and the Buller phenomenon in the mushroom-forming Basidiomycete Coprinellus disseminatus"!
Aug. 29, 2015. Trading places. We welcome Dr. Domingos da Silva Leite (Professor Sundays) from Universidade de Campinas, Brazil who will be here for one year on sabbatical. Sadly we must say goodbye to Joice Ruggeri who returns to Universidade de Rio de Janeiro to defend her thesis. Good luck and thanks for a great year Joice!
Aug. 2, 2015. Michigan Mycologist wins major presentation award! Congratulations to Rob Powers for winning best oral presentation at this year's Mycological Society of America meeting in Edmonton, Alberta for his talk "Sexual Selection and The Buller Phenomenon in the Bipolar Basidiomycete, Coprinellus disseminatus". Preparations for the thesis defense and celebration are underway.
July 15, 2015. Anat Belasen wins best talk at the Association for Tropical Biology 2015 meeting in Honolulu, HI for her talk: "How does habitat fragmentation affect disease susceptibility? Examining the relationships between geography, population genetics, and disease". Congratulations! Pictured below with our collaborator Felipe Toledo.
July 1, 2015. Detroit Zoo Fellow and Ph.D. student Jill Myers participates in Portal to the Public Day at the Detroit Zoo. Read full article here
May 8, 2015. Well defended! Congratulations to Buck Castillo who masterfully defended his M.Sc. thesis, “Belowground Plant and Fungal Community Response to an Accelerated Forest Succession Experiment”. Buck shown below in center with his two proud co-advisors.
April 20, 2015. EEB’s Early Career Scientist Symposium a success! Clarisse Betancourt Román, an EEB and mycology lab alumna (EEB MS 2014) who is now at the University of Oregon’s Biology and the Built Environment Center, presents her research during the poster session that was open to students from all universities. Read more here
Jan-Feb. 2015: Michigan Mycology back in Brazil in summer of 2015 to continue or start new projects on Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. Clockwise from top left. Tamilie Carvalho (UNICAMP) and Thomas Jenkinson collecting tadpoles from the “hybrid stream” in Morretes, Paraná. Driving back in the Combi with Gui Becker after sampling Eleutherodactylus johnstonei, the invasive Antilles coqui which has established a hyper dense but spatially limited population (about 2 x 2 blocks) in downtown São Paulo. An undescribed Scinax of the perpusillus group sampled on Ihla Mar Virado. Thoropa taophora, a specialist species that inhabits wet rocky regions across islands and the coast of São Paulo state and a focus of Anat Belasen’s project on habitat fragmentation on disease susceptibility.
09/22/14: Welcome to six new members of the Michigan Mycology Lab! Pictured below (L to R):
Prof. Frances Trail, sabbatical visitor from Plant Biology at Michigan State University
Ellen James (no relation), new lab assistant
Joice Ruggeri Gomes, visiting PhD student from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Dr. Yuan-Ying Su, visiting scholar from Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing
Dr. Alisha Quandt, new postdoctoral fellow from Oregon State University (Spatafora Lab)
Jillian Meyers, new PhD student from James Madison University
05/19/14: Clarisse Betancourt-Román masterfully defends her M.Sc. thesis entitled “Differential virulence among panzootic, novel and hybrid lineages of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis on a single host species, Lithobates sylvaticus.” Congratulations Clarisse!
04/03/14: Anat and Clarisse serve up a diversity of fun-filled science to elementary school students through the FEMMES program: Females Excelling More in Math, Engineering, and Science. Read more here.
01/22/14: Tim, Thomas and Anat complete another trip to the Brazilian Atlantic Forest for surveying of chytridiomycosis prevalence and diversity. More details here.
Bd 2014 Team (L-R): Felipe Toledo, Carolina Lambertini, Anat Belasen, Anyelet Valencia, Kelly Zamudio, Antonio de Padua, Tim James, Thomas Jenkinson), not pictured: João Gasparini.
01/01/14: Thank you Mycology Class of 2013 for a fun and inspiring semester! Keep the spore alive.
11/16/13: Two meetings of the Batrachochytrium in Brazil project. One in Tempe with the Annual Amphibian Diseases meeting, and a second in Ann Arbor with colleagues from UNICAMP and Cornell U. We took Felipe Toledo and Brazilian colleagues to the Toledo Zoo for a behind the scenes tour of the herp collection. Thanks to Anat for organizing this!
8/28/13: Welcome to Dr. Tom Fowler on sabbatical from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Tom will be working on genomics of the homothallic Schizophyllum umbrinum.
8/19/13: Thomas wins award for best oral presentation at the Annual Mycological Society of America meeting in Austin, TX for his talk entitled, "Pandemic, novel, and hybrid genotypes of the amphibian pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis in the southern Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil." Congratulations Thomas!
6/5/13: Welcome to Dr. Matthias Gube, who is visiting the lab this summer to work on various basidiomycete projects, particularly the genomics of Leucoagaricus. Matthias is visiting from Erika Kothe's group at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena.
5/16/13: Tim participates in teaching a workshop on Microbial Population Genetics and Evolution at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Microbiology, Beijing. Instructors were : Jianping Xu, Xuhua Xia, and Tim James. The workshop culminated in a research symposium with excellent talks from the workshop participants.
1/04/13: Thomas, Clarisse Betancourt, and I depart for Brazil. We will be researching chytridiomycosis in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest in collaboration with Felipe Toledo and Domingos Leite (UNICAMP).
11/04/12: Second Cagean Walk with Prof. Michael Gurevich’s Performing Arts Technology class (audio), Mycotics (lyrics), and the Michigan Mushroom Hunters Club at Bird Hills Park.
08/10/12: Lisa Schloegel, Felipe Toledo paper on Bd genotypes in the frog trade is published with important implications for the role of frog farming in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. link to pdf.
05/22/12: Thomas interviewed by Radio Australia on his work on “mushies” of Micronesia!
04/30/12: Iman participates in local BioBlitz with Detroit area highschoolers. There was a morel to the story.
04/14/12: The Mycotics participate in a John Cage performance/fungal foray to honor his 100th birthday. This collaboration was the brain child of Prof. Michael Gurevich (UM School of Music, Theatre and Dance).
12/09/11: Sadly the end of the 2nd Biology of Fungi class. Thanks everyone for a wonderful semester! Class will be taught again in Fall of 2013.
09/06/11: Welcome to new Ph.D. student Thomas Jenkinson! Thomas recently received his M.Sc. in mycology at San Francisco State University with Dennis Desjardin studying the genus Marasmius.
08/06/11: Brian Malloure wins best student poster at the MSA meeting in Fairbanks. “Estimating inbreeding in the bird's nest fungus Cyathus stercoreus using microsatellites and mating type allele distribution.” Way to go Brian!
07/29/11: A fond farewell to Maria Lee who is moving to Athens, GA to pursue a PhD in Plant Biology with Michelle Momany. Thanks and good luck Maria; it’s been awesome to work with you!
05/04/11: Congratulations to Kate Zemenick who was awarded an NSF predoctoral fellowship! Kate will be joining the Graduate Group in Ecology at UC Davis this Fall.
03/15/11: Welcome to Elena Zvyagina visiting from Yugansky Nature Reserve to work on boletes of Siberia
10/04/10: Congratulations and farewell to Dr. Linda van Diepen who is moving on to a postdoctoral position with Serita Frey at U. New Hampshire. Good luck Linda and thanks for a great year!
09/17/10: We are pleased to have Lisa Schloegel back for another research visit
08/26/10: Optical map of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis completed. JEL423 has 16 chromosomes (1N).
02/23/10: Mycology discussion group begins, Rm. 1270, 9 am
12/11/09: Last day of Biology of Fungi Class (EEB468). Class will be taught again in Fall 2011.
06/05/09: new paper on global chytridiomycosis population genetics published in PLoS Pathogens.
04/30/09: Lisa Schloegel from Wildlife Trust visiting to study the population genetics of chytridiomycosis in bullfrogs.