Mycology Symposium, Day 2

Day 2 of the Duke Mycology Symposium has wound to a close, [DAY 1 HERE] and I am sitting on my porch contemplating the afternoon’s lectures:

“Pathogen recombination during the amphibian Chytridiomycosis pandemic: Why change what’s working?”

A genetics perspective on Bd, a fungus responsible for widespread amphibian mortality. Apparently one of the factors in its spread is the abundance and transport of bullfrogs (raised for food) and xenopus frogs (used in medical research), which can carry the disease without being killed by it. The recent spread is caused by a single Bd strain which reproduces by cloning itself – it should therefor be genetically uniform. Yet, in practice Bd has a ‘dynamic genome’. This led to discussion led to mechanisms for genetic change without sex, such as mitotic crossover and gene conversion.

“Pathogenicity factors in the chytrid fungus and amphibian pathogen B. dendrobatidis”

Further discussion of Bd, this time from a molecular / genomic perspective. Perhaps the most interesting part was evidence that chytrids contain rhodopsin, a light-sensitive pigment. [] I was also alerted to the existence of the 1000 fungal genomes project.

“Pleiotropic roles of the UPR pathway in Cryptococcus”

UPR is the unfolded protein response – when there are bits of proteins floating around inside a cell, it’s a bad sign. Maybe those proteins were torn apart by heat, or a toxin. This talk looked at the responses of Cryptococcus to the presence of the UPRs. In some cases, they release ‘chaperones’, proteins which help other molecules assemble correctly. Or, they might release dedegredation enzymes to clean up the mess. In extreme cases, they may even trigger apoptosis, a sort of cellular suicide.

“The adaptive value of Flo11‐dependent flocculation and adhesion in yeast”

Epigenetics: Not just for woo-meisters! Click for sauce.

Proteins on the surface of certain yeast cells act  to let the cells stick together and form clusters, which then fall out of their liquid medium. The gene for this surface protein is under considerable epigenetic control – there was a really beautiful picture the speaker presented, in which genetically identical yeast cells nonetheless have different levels of gene expression. Additionally, this phenomenon is an example of the green beard effect.

“Fear the Titans: When bad yeast get worse”

Titan cells are variants of cryptococcus. as much as 20 times as large as typical cells.

Mycology Symposium, Day 1

When I’m not too busy raging at skuptaloids online, I enjoy molecular biology and mycology, the study of fungi. Towards those ends, I’m visiting the Duke Symposium in Celebration of Mycology and Mycologists. I was only able to attend a few afternoon lectures on the first day of this conference, but am enjoying it greatly! Some of the lectures I attended:

“Glycoengineered yeast: from platform to product”

A completely qualitative assesment of the information storage in various biochemical media. You can see why I have a huge crush on glycans. Souce is "Emerging Glycomics Technologies" by Turnbull and Feild 2007; click for lynkz

Discussed the engineering considerations is convincing yeasts to produce biochemicals – for example, drugs. A major challenge is in glycosylation, the addition of complex sugars to proteins. Glycochemistry is very interesting to me; it is still very much a biochemical frontier.

“Membrane lipids and fungal virulence”

Glucosylceramides in fungi and humans are different, with fungal compounds featuring an unsaturated site and a methyl side group. Humans and fungi also have slightly different enzyme active sites to deal with these differences, suggesting that drugs can be developed to target the active sites in fungal pathogens without disrupting human biochemistry. The drug candidates discussed actually have analogs in commercial fungicides.