Aneuploidy causes genome plasticity and enables adaptive responses that confer drug resistance in eukaryotes ranging from fungal pathogens to human cancer cells. Aspergillus fumigatus is a soil-reside...

A mycovirus infecting the pathogenic fungus Aspergillus fumigatus enhances its stress tolerance and virulence in mice.

Our current carbon economy relies on fossil fuels, from which we isolate small organic molecules to produce medicines, plastics, cosmetic, or other chemicals that we use everyday. However, sustainability requires a more biomass-based carbon economy, where we engineer plants to produce precursor molecules, which can then be assembled to desired chemicals that we use daily. Plants have evolved an amazing diversity of metabolites, but these metabolites are not produced in every cell of the plant. Therefore, it is essential to understand how plants can express different metabolic pathways across different organs, tissues, and even cell types. We are interested in the following questions: How are metabolic pathways (especially specialized metabolism) controlled by cell fate? How can we reprogram plant cell fates for biomanufacturing? How can we toggle between differentiated cell states for metabolic engineering and totipotent cell state for genetic engineering?

The construction and high-precision fitness profiling of a C. neoformans knockout library reveals a high-resolution functional map of its genome and allowed for the identification of fungal analogs of...

Nature Communications - Giant transposons, known as ‘Starships’, mediate horizontal gene transfer between fungal genomes. Here, Sato et al. show that Starships occupy genome regions...

No “one size fits all” option exists for treating fungal infections in large part due to genetic and phenotypic variability among strains. Accounting for strain heterogeneity is thus fundamental for d...

Inorganic phosphate (Pi) is essential for life, and plant cells monitor Pi availability by sensing inositol pyrophosphate (PP-InsP) levels. In this work, we describe the hijacking of plant phosphate s...

Sex-specific homeodomain ( HD ) proteins are key regulators of cell identity and sexual development in fungi, typically functioning as heterodimers to regulate transcription. In the human fungal patho...

We recently described CRISPR/Cas9-based short homology-dependent genome engineering in the human fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans , a haploid budding yeast that is the most common cause of fung...

Lichens are composite, symbiotic associations of fungi, algae, and bacteria that result in large, anatomically complex organisms adapted to many of th…

Starships form a recently discovered superfamily of giant transposons in Pezizomycotina fungi, implicated in mediating horizontal transfer of diverse cargo genes between fungal genomes. Their elusive nature has long obscured their significance, and their impact on genome evolution remains poorly understood. Here, we reveal a surprising abundance and diversity of Starships in the phytopathogenic fungus Verticillium dahliae. Remarkably, Starships dominate the plastic genomic compartments involved in host colonization, are enriched in virulence-associated genes, and exhibit genetic and epigenetic characteristics associated with adaptive genome evolution. We further uncover extensive horizontal transfer of Starships between Verticillium species and, strikingly, from distantly related Fusarium fungi. Finally, we demonstrate how Starship activity facilitated the de novo formation of a novel virulence gene. Our findings illuminate the profound influence of Starship dynamics on fungal genome evolution and the development of virulence. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.