🪱 Selfish genes are everywhere and drive some of biology’s biggest innovations (CRISPR, antibody recombination, epigenetics). Yet almost no one asks the obvious question: how does a selfish gene begin? Our new manuscript uncovers how selfishness can emerge directly from the host genome.
Wow. Cells ratcheted up the Transposon Arms Race a notch further than we'd realised.
👉Excited to share our latest work @natmicrobiol.nature.com, revealing a decrease in cytoplasmic crowding during filamentous growth in the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans. Furthermore we found that inhibition of ribosome biogenesis can trigger filamentous growth in this pathogen
rdcu.be/eT1Su
Proud to start a new chapter as a Beatriz Galindo Assistant Professor at the Universidad de Murcia (@um.es). Looking forward to new science, new ideas, and new horizons! 💡🧪🧬🌈
Exciting news for the RNA research community!
The Human RNome Project has been launched: a global effort to map all human RNAs and their chemical modifications. Proud to support it and contribute to the article in Genome Biology doi.org/10.1186/s130...
#RNA #bioinformatics #RNAstructure #modomics
Happy to share the results of a long-haul post-doc project, now online @science.org, aiming at understanding the rules of transgeneration epigenetic inheritance over TEs in plants and its extent and impact in nature. More below!
doi.org/10.1126/scie...
Very excited to announce launch of brand new journal npj Fungal Science! As EIC I'm joined by a fantastic board of academic editors from across the mycology field. You can learn more about the journal scope and submit your work here: www.nature.com/npjfungalsci/
🚨 Fungi + viruses + mammalian lungs? Buckle up! Our new paper in
@natmicrobiol.nature.com
uncovers the story of a deadly fungus and its gnarly viral hitchhiker — and how this duo may change how we diagnose & treat fungal disease 🍄🫁🚨 doi.org/10.1038/s415... ⬇️
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Thanks to our amazing team and collaborators @maribelnm.bsky.social. Excited to hear your thoughts!
#Epigenetics #RNAi #RNA #RNAbiology #Inheritance #Meiosis #Genomics #AMR #DrugResistance #FungalPathogens #IDSky #Fungi
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Beyond infectious diseases, epimutations also push the boundaries of what we know about inheritance, showing RNA can serve as an information molecule across generations.
RNA-based epigenetic inheritance might echo the ancient “RNA world”, where RNA was considered the original molecule of life.
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Why this matters:
Epimutations may explain pervasive and reversible antifungal drug resistance in Mucoralean pathogens, a serious concern for immunocompromised patients.
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Epimutations were inherited in non-Mendelian ratios, even when the offspring’s DNA came from a drug-susceptible parent.
The resistance was carried only by small RNAs, uncoupled from histone modifications or DNA methylation typically associated with epigenetic inheritance in other organisms.
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We mated our epimutants and tracked the fate of these epimutations in their progeny, confirming meiosis through whole-genome sequencing.
Check out our new nearly telomere-to-telomere reference genomes here:
🔗 www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/datasets/gen...
🔗 www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/datasets/gen...
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Here is the big question:
Can RNAi-based changes be passed on through sexual reproduction?
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In Mucor circinelloides, these epimutations are entirely RNA-based.
They silence the drug target gene FKBP12 through small RNAs, granting resistance to FK506. Resistance appears when the pathogen faces the drug and disappears when the pressure is gone.
Like switching drug resistance on and off ⏯️
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Fungi can resist antifungal drugs without mutating their DNA. Instead, they use epimutations, heritable changes in gene expression driven by RNA interference or chromatin modifications.
🚨 New paper in @natcomms.nature.com
After a constructive and rewarding peer-review process (huge thanks to our editors and reviewers) we can finally share it:
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The evolutionary foundations of transcriptional regulation in animals www.nature.com/articles/s41... (read free: rdcu.be/evDcA) 🧬🖥️🧪
Epigenetics Update - Complementary genetic and epigenetic changes facilitate rapid adaptation to multiple global change stressors bit.ly/4lUiuPH
Reid S. Brennan/Melissa H. Pespeni (University of Vermont) in PNAS
#Epigenetics #Stress #Adaptation
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Empower your research with epigenometech.com
A little belated posting, but we (Emily Navarrete, Leonid Mirny, me) have an updated preprint in collaboration the Ines Drinnenberg, Héloïse Muller, José Gil Jr, + others on the strange and striking compartmentalization of silkworm chromatin: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
We wrote a review on Transposable Elements (TEs) and almost all aspects of TE silencing and their roles in biological processes & disease.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Excited to share our new paper in @cellreports.bsky.social that reshapes our understanding of chromosome organization's deep evolutionary roots! Our work dives into the origins of the machinery that structures our very genomes.
🔗: doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...
#Genomics #Evolution #CellBiology #LECA
Four images to illustrate some prominent single-gene myths. Top left shows a photograph of a person deftly rolling their tongue into a U-shape. Top right shows a photograph of a person’s ear, highlighting the shape and features of the earlobe and cartilage. Bottom left shows a close-up photograph of a person’s eye, with a vivid blue colouration. Bottom right shows a photograph of a person poised to write with their left hand on the blank white page of a spiral-bound notebook.
Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n
wow, telomeric transposons in bacteria with linear chromosomes! (of course this was first figured out in flies, inc by Bob Levis, who i was happy to see few days ago at the fly meeting). 🪰
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Fungi have evolved multicellularity multiple times.
🟡➡️🍄
Minou Nowrousian asks how to fungi control expression across structures 🍄 and time 🕜?
Transcription factors & chromatin interact to coordinate expression!
#ecfg17
We are indebted to Alessia Buscaino for the discovery that the Candida albicans type SC5314 type strain is an RNAi Argonaut mutant. Her great talk today also shows that this is relevant to microbiome and macrophage interactions and has host niche specific consequences. @ecfg172025.bsky.social
Post-doc in fungal molecular cell biology. Seeking person with an understanding of gene expression and phenotypic analysis, who is interested in epigenetic regulation in fungi, to explore mechanisms of antifungal resistance in Zymoseptoria tritici and Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Email me! #ECFG17
Such an exciting 3rd Symposium on the Basal Fungal Kingdom! a complete success! Intriguing discussions with this amazing community. Now #ECFG17!
