News
Welcome to the Lab Fabi!
Fabiola has joined the lab and is working with Syrena, Bryson, Reese and Giulia on a project examining Chytrid pathogenicity on phytoplankton under climate change. Welcome aboard!
Lots of fun(gal) updates!
So, it’s been a minute since we’ve updated the website… here’s what you missed.
Big e komo mai to Quinn Moon, Giulia Marenco Di Moriondo, and Reese Tsubota who have stepped in to help with culturing and with our phytoplankton pathogen studies. Glad you’re here!
Ronja received funding to present at SACNAS in Puerto Rico later this month, depending on the recovery situation there.
Syrena got funding for and presented at the Gordon Conference on Marine Microbes in Switzerland!
Anthony took a new position in the Pacific Biosciences Research Center, a unit within the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. The biggest change is that has assumed leadership of the Integrated Center of Environmental Microbiomes and Human Health, a Center of Biomedical Excellence funded by the NIH.
In funding news, NSF gave the thumbs up on our Rules of Life proposal to study the role of Microbes in food web efficiency and complexity. This 5 year grant is in collaboration with Nicole Hynson, Peter Sadowski and Matt Medeiros, and will use experimental microcosms to gain a mechanistic understanding of microbial roles in food webs. We’ve started characterizing Bromeliad invertebrate and microbial communities to build up our understanding of this simple food web. Stay tuned for more on this.
Oh, yeah, we published a bunch of papers, check it out:
Amend, A. S., Swift, S. O., Darcy, J. L., Belcaid, M., Nelson, C. E., Buchanan, J., … & Hynson, N. A. (2022). A ridge-to-reef ecosystem microbial census reveals environmental reservoirs for animal and plant microbiomes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(33), e2204146119.
Read more about this here
Darcy, J. L., Amend, A. S., Swift, S. O., Sommers, P. S., & Lozupone, C. A. (2022). specificity: an R package for analysis of feature specificity to environmental and higher dimensional variables, applied to microbiome species data. Environmental microbiome, 17(1), 1-12.
Tipton, L., Zahn, G. L., Darcy, J. L., Amend, A. S., & Hynson, N. A. (2022). Hawaiian fungal amplicon sequence variants reveal otherwise hidden biogeography. Microbial ecology, 83(1), 48-57.
Boekhout, T., Amend, A. S., El Baidouri, F., Gabaldón, T., Geml, J., Mittelbach, M., … & Yurkov, A. (2021). Trends in yeast diversity discovery. Fungal Diversity, 1-47.
SO. MUCH. NEWS.
This last year was quite a blur…Here’s what happened:
Departures:
Post-doc Fouad El Baidouri left us for a researcher position with the Neafsy Lab at Harvard/Broad. Gone, but not forgotten!
Dr. Andre Boraks successfully defended his PhD and is off to work with the International Conservation Fund of Canada. A hui hou!
Joani Villiunas is heading downhill to work on glowing squid in the McFall-Ngai lab.
Sean Swift has moved on to persue his PhD in the Craig Nelson lab.
Anthony’s on sabbatical through January 2022
Welcome to the lab:
Undergraduates Bryson Gonzalez, Chloe Twitchell, Max Gatlin and Tyler Stynes have been hard at work isolating marine fungi for our growing culture collection.
Isabel McRae is also helping out for the summer while on break from UCLA.
Congratulations:
Ronja Steinbach for her NOAA EPP MSI award and for receiving the UH Conservation Award to study marine fungal metabolism of plastics! Great job!
Danyel Yogi for receivig an NSF REL supplement to fund her continuing work with Marine Malassezia.
Read all about it:
Boraks, A., Plunkett, G. M., Doro, T. M., Alo, F., Sam, C., Tuiwawa, M., … & Amend, A. S. (2021). Scale-dependent influences of distance and vegetation on the composition of aboveground and belowground tropical fungal communities. Microbial Ecology, 81(4), 874-883.
Egan, C. P., Koko, J. H., Muir, C. D., Zahn, G., Swift, S. O., Amend, A. S., & Hynson, N. A. (2021). Restoration of the mycobiome of the endangered Hawaiian mint Phyllostegia kaalaensis increases its resistance to a common powdery mildew. Fungal Ecology, 52, 101070.
Bernard, J., Wall, C. B., Costantini, M. S., Rollins, R. L., Atkins, M. L., Cabrera, F. P., … & Amend, A. S. (2021). Plant part and a steep environmental gradient predict plant microbial composition in a tropical watershed. The ISME Journal, 15(4), 999-1009.
Tipton, L., Zahn, G. L., Darcy, J. L., Amend, A. S., & Hynson, N. A. (2021). Hawaiian Fungal Amplicon Sequence Variants Reveal Otherwise Hidden Biogeography. Microbial Ecology, 1-10.
Chock, M. K., Hoyt, B., & Amend, A. S. (2021). Mycobiome transplant increases resistance to Austropuccinia psidii in an endangered Hawaiian plant. Phytobiomes Journal.
New monograph by Gerry and others on Holarctic Pluteus
Molecular phylogeny and phylogeography of Holarctic species of Pluteus section Pluteus (Agaricales: Pluteaceae), with description of twelve new species.
Congratulations Gerry!
Malassezia paper is out in PLOS Pathogens
Check out the latest PLoS Pearl about marine fungi and coral dandruff: From Dandruff to Deep-Sea Vents: Malassezia-like Fungi are Ecologically Hyper-diverse
We have scopes!
They’re here! Rick Gardner, from Zeiss, has kindly flown over to set up our fancy new microscopes. With DIC and epi-fluorescence capabilities, pesky little microbes will have nowhere to hide.