Somehow, the cell machinery can make homozygous knockouts from a single transformation! Without a described sexual cycle, this is really important! If you only had heterozygous transformant, the molecular genetics would be very difficult. What a crazy result! 🤯

@zombieantdoc.bsky.social spreading the biology of zombie ant fungus in the ESEB plenary. Showing mechanisms of how fungi hijack ant behaviour to help their own dispersal.

Mushroom needs to be perfectly aligned to release their spores, look at these shelf fungi where the log fell over between the years that the fungus grew. Somehow, the fungus can totally re-orient itself to the new direction of gravity! Since these fungi lack OCTIN, we don't know how they do it! 8/8

To see how these crystals work, Schimek et al. took a hyphae and put it upside down. At first, the crystal are at the top of the hyphae (arrows), and fall to the bottom (second image). Presumably there is a receptor coating the membrane wall to sense this sedimentation doi.org/10.1007/s004... 5/8

To identify OCTIN, the authors used Edman degration to sequence the protein directly! Not your typical genetic mapping strategy! Protein seems to be made a short/long transcript, and surprisingly, the gene seems to come from a bacterial origin, other fungi don't seem to have similar genes. 4/8

These protein complexes are so large that they fall in the cell, and somehow direct the growing sporangiphore to be vertical. Look at these beautiful pyramidal crystals! These crystals were known visually to fall inside the cytoplasm for decades, but the genetics was unknown. 3/8

One of the really surprising things they found was that a single nucleus was stretched when passing through septa, becoming as much as 40 um long! This screenshot from Figure 5A shows this

The movies of this amazing behaviour are available here: figshare.com/s/e3c33f69ef.... Brun et al use Neurospora where one has green nuclei (used as female) and the other red (used as male). Figure 1A shows the long female structure, the trichogyne, that moves around, finding partners.

It was really cool to see validation that identified new haplotypes presumed under selection actually conferred a fitness benefit. In this case ability of haplotype H to grow on all wheat varieties (each row of leaves a different variety). Genomic epidemiology can inform what varieties farmers plant

Key things I found interesting, the strongest signal of recent selection, on Chr 4 here, has no identified function. This is often under discussed in genomic studies, it is easy to identify targets of selection, but much more difficult to identify the source of selection.

In fungi, sexual spores are often dormant and resistant. Some thought ascospores had little impact on the genetics, and clonal spread dominated. This study used genomics to show otherwise, clonal spread was minimal across Europe. One piece of evidence: even mating type frequencies (also LD decay)

The authors sampled powdery mildew of wheat, a major pathogen, from across Europe. This fungus makes wild sexual structures, chasmothecia, that look like pac-man with a million arms. However, the role of these structures in population genetics was unclear. Are these creating genetic diversity?

Hey @imperfectfunguy.bsky.social I seem to be in a bit of a sticky situation. Mold growing on my glue stick. Any ideas?