Seminar Series | upcoming event & news story
Upcoming event/12-1pm on Thursday 26 March >Imperial Fungal Science Network | Seminar Series | Keynote Speaker – Yen-Ping Hsueh (Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen)
Reporting/The Network’s ECR Talks for the Spring Term were held on Thursday 19 February at the Flowers Building on South Kensington Campus. Thank you to our audience – it was great to host so many of our members in-person and delighted that many were also able to join us online. And thank you to the invited speaker guests, together with our ECR Reps (Eleonora Moratto, Marco Balducci, Tom Williams), for a programme which explored each of the Network themes.
Lauren Dineen is a post-doc in the Armstrong-James lab in the Department of Infectious Disease at Imperial College London. She presented Exploring tRNA biology of fungi: fundamental and pathogenesis perspectives. Lauren presented her research employing cutting edge direct tRNA sequencing and ML annotation methods to compare tRNA modification and modifying enzyme diversity across an entire fungal subphylum, the Saccharomycotina. She also presented her research focused on a functional analysis of a genome-wide tRNA knock out library in the human pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus, where she uncovered a unique tRNA involved in antifungal sensitivity. Together this research highlighted the underappreciated diversity of tRNA in fungi, and that tRNA are involved in stress adaptation in fungal pathogens.
Louis Cohen is a PhD student in the Stanley lab in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London. He presented “Mycorrhiza-on-a-chip” – developing microfluidic systems for studying root-fungal symbioses. Louis presented his innovative research, employing advanced microfluidic technology to design customized and simplified microenvironments tailored for the real-time monitoring of pre-symbiotic interactions between mycorrhizal fungi and plant roots. This approach provides a unique opportunity to investigate the underlying mechanisms driving symbiotic communication and crosstalk, offering valuable insights into the complexities of these critical ecological interactions.
Marco Balducci, ECR Rep for Ecology, Evolution and the Environment (Savolainen Lab, Department of Life Sciences, Silwood Park, Imperial College London), presented Can symbiosis underpin local adaptation? Marco explored how Howea palms and their arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal (AMF) communities vary across host species and soil environments. Using metabarcoding and meta-transcriptomics, he showed that both fungal community composition and function shift with habitat, revealing coordinated changes in stress tolerance and cross-kingdom gene expression. His work highlights how environmentally structured plant-microbiome interactions may contribute to local adaptation in natural systems.
We look forward to the next ECR Talks in the Summer Term.