Whether you find them beautiful, ugly or downright tasty, fungi are just about everywhere. More than mushrooms, fungi are a huge and varied kingdom of eukaryotic organisms that include microorganisms like yeasts and molds. As the principal decomposers in ecological systems, they are responsible for nutrient cycling and exchange in the environment. They have long been used as a source of human food in the form of mushrooms and truffles, and as the key to the fermentation of food products including beer, wine and soy sauce. And that’s before we even get to the potential magic of psilocybin...
This Fall, join RCIScience as we scratch the surface of Earth’s largest organism. We’ll introduce the basics of fungi, join mushroom hunters in the wild to uncover the vast fungal networks beneath our feet, examine fungal prospects as pathogens and delight in their potential applications for environmental remediation, medicine, food science and much more! 🍄
About the Speakers
Moderator: Dr. Amanda Veri is a microbiologist who fell in love with microbes during her PhD at the University of Toronto where she studied all the tricks fungi use to cause disease in humans. She is fortunate to work at the University Health Network, where she builds and runs programs to support trainees and scientists, including outreach events to inspire curiosity and support the next generation of scientists.
Jessie MacAlpine is a senior PhD student in the Cowen lab at the University of Toronto. Her research involves studying the interactions between human fungal pathogens and the friendly bacteria living in our bodies. In her spare time, Jessie loves the outdoors and spends most of her time hunting for mushrooms on hikes and trail runs.
Jehoshua Sharma is a PhD student from Trinidad and Tobago, currently studying the fungal pathogen Candida albicans at the University of Guelph. His current research looks for compounds that can enhance the activity of known drugs or that can disarm the pathogen of virulence mechanisms that make them harmful to the human host. He is also developing novel CRISPR variants to study the functional genomics of drug resistant Candida albicans isolates. Outside of the lab, Jehoshua is a co-founder of cGEM, a Canadian-wide initiative connecting research groups tasked with using synthetic biology to solve real-world problems. His aim is to give students access to the tools they need to conduct research independently and communicate their research on a wider scale to the public.
Prof. Jianping “JP” Xu obtained his BSc specializing in Agronomy from Jiangxi Agricultural University, MSc specializing in Agricultural Microbiology from Nanjing Agricultural University, and PhD specializing in Fungal Genetics from the University of Toronto. After 3.5 years of postdoctoral research training specializing in the population biology of human fungal pathogens at Duke University, JP joined the Department of Biology at McMaster University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in 2000 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2012. His current research examines the genetics and population biology of several groups of fungi, including wild mushrooms, plant fungal pathogens, and human and animal fungal pathogens.