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.

John Everett, part III.0: If some is good, then more must be better.

A part of my John Everett series – read more: 0/I – II.0 – II.5 – II.75 –  III.0 – III.3 – IV.0 – IV.4 – IV.8 – V – VII – VIII – Full Report 

Coccoliths: microscopic death stars of the ocean. Via Wikimedia Commons

Have you ever gone camping with someone who doesn’t know how to build a fire? It might go something like this: you get a pile of twigs burning, and immediately your friend starts piling on huge logs. The fire dwindles. “Hey,” your friend says, “This fire sucks. It must need more logs.” If some fuel is good, then more must be better. It’s a terrible way to roast marshmallows. And yet it’s the philosophy that Dr. Everett applies to the effects of increased carbon dioxide on life.

Here’s an example from part I of his testimony: