Harry Chown

Geographic distribution and associated mortality of invasive aspergillosis and mucormycosis among Medicare enrollees in the United States (2008-2015) Invasive aspergillosis and mucormycosis are widely distributed in the United States, with certain regions experiencing significantly higher incidences. For invasive aspergillosis, each increase of 5 c...

www.journalofinfection.com/article/S016... 🚨🚨🍄🍄 new research from Washington University Mycoses Group (WUMG) reveals that Invasive aspergillosis & mucormycosis show broad geographic distribution across the U.S. Regions with higher incidence report lower associated mortality. @fungaldoc.bsky.social

The spatiotemporal distribution of human pathogens in ancient Eurasia - Nature Screening shotgun-sequencing data from ancient humans covering 37,000 years of Eurasian history uncovers the widespread presence of ancient bacterial, viral and parasite DNA and zoonotic pathogens…

#MetagenomicsMonday Analysis of aDNA from 1313 ancient human remains spanning 37k years revealed that the rise of infectious diseases coincided with animal domestication around 65k years ago, with disease spread intensifying during pastoralist migrations.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Tour de Fungi for The Aspergillosis Trust Help Harry Chown raise money to support Aspergillosis Trust

6 WEEKS LEFT before we cycle from London to Norwich for the BSMM annual scientific meeting. Raising funds for The Aspergillosis Trust. Please donate (link below) or if you want to take part get in touch ☺️
www.justgiving.com/page/harry-c...

Starship giant transposons dominate plastic genomic regions in a fungal plant pathogen and drive virulence evolution Nature Communications - Giant transposons, known as ‘Starships’, mediate horizontal gene transfer between fungal genomes. Here, Sato et al. show that Starships occupy genome regions...

📣 Happy to see the journal publication 📄 of our work on Starships 🚀 in Verticillium fungi: terrific work led by @yukiyosato.bsky.social
rdcu.be/exBSp

A circular logo featuring a human, livestock animal, tree and crops facing an aspergillus fumigatus conidiophore.

At the network launch event in April, we announce a competition for ECRs to design our logo. It is with great pleasure that we can now share the finished product, based on a winning design by @chownbioinf.bsky.social !

Nice 48km cycle from Paddington to Royal Holloway for #BMS2025

Oooo...ahhhh

🎉🎉 congrats!

Structural motif search across the protein-universe with Folddisco https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.06.663357v1

Linkage-based ortholog refinement in bacterial pangenomes with CLARC Abstract. Bacterial genomes exhibit significant variation in gene content and sequence identity. Pangenome analyses explore this diversity by classifying g

New tool for pangenome analysis! CLARC refines bacterial gene clusters using functional annotation + linkage—not just sequence. New publication by @indragon.bsky.social & collaborators, advised by @mlipsitch.bsky.social & @billhanage.bsky.social. Read more at bit.ly/4ek0Y51

Photo of Royal Holloway, University of London (our meeting venue) and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew - where we'll be hearing from Kew Mycology & visiting the Fungarium.

Only 10 days to go! We can’t wait to see everyone at our Annual Scientific Meeting #BMS2025 and hear the latest in fungal biology research. Take a look at the programme: www.britmycolsoc.org.uk/asm.html

Fish-lens image of the Pocket Forest

Information on the forest

Photograph of a blue roundhead fungus

Walked from Victoria to South Kensington for the Imperial Fungal Network and stumbled on a Pocket Forest teeming with fungi (apparently)! Fascinating info on the SUGi project & Miyawaki forests. There are more UK sites—worth a visit! www.sugiproject.com/hertiage-for...

@bsmm-meeting.bsky.social

Tour de Fungi for The Aspergillosis Trust Help Harry Chown raise money to support Aspergillosis Trust

🚴‍♂️ Sept 6th-7th, I’m riding from London to Norwich (over 200km) to attend BSMM and to support the Aspergillosis Trust! Join me for the ride by getting in touch or donate to help raise awareness + fund research into this life-impacting fungal disease. 💛
👉 www.justgiving.com/page/harry-c...

Now published! Note that since Vikram's original post (quoted here), he's made it easy to dynamically update a set of multi-MUMs (e.g. when more genomes are added to a pangenome) and to find multi-MUMs for huge collections like HPRCv2 genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Join us for the next ProSE Seminar!
We are excited to welcome Sophie Heiding for a talk on "Computational Insights into Protein Adaptation Across Environmental Gradients"
Date: June 10
Time: 4PM CET
Register here: tinyurl.com/prose-seminar2
Please share!
🧪 #MEvoSky

I'm happy to announce the latest release of the GlobDB, available at globdb.org.

The GlobDB is a database of "species dereplicated" microbial genomes, and as of release 226 contains twice the number of species-representative genomes (306,260) than the latest GTDB release.

The biogeography and conservation of Earth’s ‘dark’ ectomycorrhizal fungi In this review, van Galen et al. use global soil metabarcoding databases to evaluate current estimates of the total number of ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungal species on Earth, outline the current state o...

Our paper shows that most ectomycorrhizal fungal species (83% of OTUs) are "dark taxa": species we detect in DNA, but can't match to known species names. We map global "darkspots" - the parts of the world most in need of more research. @spun.earth @ethz.ch www.cell.com/current-biol...

Repeated loss of function at HD mating-type genes and of recombination in anther-smut fungi - Nature Communications Basidiomycete fungi typically have two mating-type loci located on different chromosomes. Here, Lucotte et al. report the convergent loss-of-function of mating-type genes across several species of phy...

Our new paper is out!
We observed a loss of function in mating compatibility for HD genes for the first time in basidiomycete fungi, and new evolutionary strata in the absence of sexually antagonistic selection!
@tatianagiraud.bsky.social
More details here 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Development of a bioassay guided genome mining approach for antifungal natural product discovery from pseudomonads Zymoseptoria tritici causes Septoria Leaf Blotch disease of wheat and has evolved to overcome most chemical and genetic control methods. As such, new tools are required for future disease control. We...

🚨 New preprint!
We've developed a bioassay-guided genome mining approach to identify bacterial secondary metabolites that inhibit Zymoseptoria tritici — a major fungal pathogen of wheat.
Available now on bioRxiv: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

New work from @kylethedavid.bsky.social and the @rokaslab.bsky.social

"Convergent expansions of keystone gene families drive metabolic innovation in Saccharomycotina yeasts"

@pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

3D-printed map of Soho in 1854. Black marks on top of the buildings represent deaths from cholera caused by infected water from the Broad Street Pump (note the missing handle!). Top-down view.

3D-printed map of Soho in 1854. Black marks on top of the buildings represent deaths from cholera caused by infected water from the Broad Street Pump (note the missing handle!). Side view.

3D-printed map of Soho in 1854. Black marks on top of the buildings represent deaths from cholera caused by infected water from the Broad Street Pump (note the missing handle!). Framed, close-up.

3D-printed map of Soho in 1854. Black marks on top of the buildings represent deaths from cholera caused by infected water from the Broad Street Pump (note the missing handle!). Frame, "artful" shot.

Day 18 #30DayMapChallenge
I 3D-printed John Snow's 1854 cholera map of Soho. It took ages.

Open Fung survey: impact of open science tools for applied fungal biology There is growing interest in partnering with fungi to develop new materials, foods, medicines, environmental solutions and more. However, the tools available for applied mycology remain limited, slowi...

Do you work in mycological spaces from academic to creative art? Take the @openfung.bsky.social survey docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Ultra-deep long-read metagenomics captures diverse taxonomic and biosynthetic potential of soil microbes Background Soil ecosystems have long been recognized as hotspots of microbial diversity, but most estimates of their complexity remain speculative, relying on limited data and extrapolation from shall...

New preprint: we sequenced one soil sample with ultra-deep hybrid metagenomics and found…
→ 800+ MAGs
→ 11,000+ BGCs
→ and still nowhere near saturation.
Soil is wild.
Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#microbiome #metagenomics #BGCs #naturalproducts #secmet

Bumble Bee Probability of Occurrence Responds to Interactions Between Local and Landscape Land Use, Climatic Niche Properties and Climate Change We analyse a collation of bumble bee presence and absence data from across the continents of Western Europe and North America, spanning both natural and human-modified habitats. We find that bumble b....

✨Bumble bee probability of occurrence responds to interactions between local and landscape land use, climatic niche properties and climate change🐝New paper out, led by @tnewbold31.bsky.social, & with @jetkerr.bsky.social & Peter Soroye (the result of some fantastic trips across the Atlantic 🇨🇦) 🌎 🧪 🌐

New paper from my lab (first author is Sonia Ghose): www.frontiersin.org/journals/mic...

Skin microbiomes of frogs vary among body regions, revealing differences that reflect known patterns of chytrid infection

Giant transposons promote strain heterogeneity in a major fungal pathogen | mBio No “one size fits all” option exists for treating fungal infections in large part due to genetic and phenotypic variability among strains. Accounting for strain heterogeneity is thus fundamental for d...

We dive into the dynamics of #starships 🚀 in a fungal pathogen to ask: how might these giant #transposons impact human health? We find they drive genome-wide variation, encode clinically-relevant traits and even transpose within the same strain! 🍄🧪 out today in mBio #goteam doi.org/10.1128/mbio...

Neutral transcriptome rewiring promotes quantitative disease resistance evolvability at the species level The evolution of quantitative disease resistance is supported by transcriptional responses conserved at the species level and variation in DNA-binding site

New paper by Florent Delplace - Sylvain Raffaele lab, Toulouse.
Cool work on network evolution underlying quantitative defence responses. It was a pleasure to host and support Florent for a few months to work on the evolutionary analyses of the paper. :)
academic.oup.com/plcell/advan...

Evaluating selection at intermediate scales within genes provides robust identification of genes under positive selection in M. tuberculosis clinical isolates https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.07.652684v1

Mutations in transcription factors that confer fluconazole resistance also confer reduced susceptibility to manogepix in Candida auris, Candida albicans, Candida parapsilosis, and Candida glabrata (Nakaseomyces glabratus) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.07.652603v1