Welcome to the Fungal Interactions Lab!
Our mission is to understand the genetic mechanisms of fungal interactions that impact plant and human health.
Our approach integrates training and mentorship with molecular experiments, software development and evolutionary analyses of genomic data. We engage in high-quality science, think creatively and critically, and support each other in building an intellectually stimulating lab community.
Fungi have been evolving strategies to interact with plants, animals and other microbes for over 500 million years. Because many fungal interactions threaten food security and public health, understanding the mechanisms driving fungal interactions is an economic and societal priority. Our research addresses this priority by asking two questions: how do fungi acquire new strategies for interacting with other organisms and when do “good” interactions turn “bad”? These questions are especially pertinent for fungal pathogens given the critical roles fungi play in plant and human microbiomes and the increasing prevalence of fungal diseases globally.
Our research on fungal interactions recently led us to discover a previously unknown mechanism of fungal evolution: giant transposons we have named Starships. These unusual elements are unlike anything ever observed before in a fungal genome for two reasons: 1) they often carry dozens of genes that impact fungal phenotypes and 2) they encode mechanisms for horizontally transferring themselves and their genetic cargo between fungal species. A major focus of our work is to now determine the role of Starships in fungal pathogenesis and to identify the rules of Starship-mediated horizontal gene transfer.
Our lab is located in beautiful Madison, Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin–Madison occupies ancestral Ho-Chunk land, a place their nation has called Teejop (day-JOPE; “Four Lakes”) since time immemorial. In an 1832 treaty, the Ho-Chunk were forced to cede this territory. Decades of ethnic cleansing followed when both the federal and state government repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, sought to forcibly remove the Ho-Chunk from Wisconsin. This history of colonization informs our shared future of collaboration and innovation. Today, UW–Madison respects the inherent sovereignty of the Ho-Chunk Nation, along with the 11 other First Nations of Wisconsin. Learn more about the tribal histories of the 12 First Nations of Wisconsin here.