Emile Gluck-Thaler

Swiss Alps seen from Neuchatel

Excited to do a postdoc in beautiful Neuchatel / Switzerland🇨🇭?

We have several postdoc positions open at the moment!

Check our website for the full ads here: pathogen-genomics.org/jobs

Happy to answer any question and please spread the word to anyone who might be interested!

That's amazing, congrats Amelia!

I am honoured and delighted to join the #CIFAR family as an Azrieli Global Scholar.

Looking forward to working with this fantastic community to tackle complex global challenges through interdisciplinary collaboration!

cifar.ca/cifarnews/20...

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...

Interpolated maps of colony-forming unit (CFU) abundance of Macrophomina phaseolina (Mp) using A, ordinary kriging and B, co-kriging, respectively. Both interpolated surfaces were generated from the observed 297 sampling locations across seven departments of the country (see Figure 1 for more details). The gradient color from red to blue depicts high to low abundance of Mp.

New risk maps developed by Sandip Mondal, @mycomile.bsky.social, Horacio Lopez-Nicora, and others, help soybean farmers spot charcoal rot before it strikes​​. 🫛 Read the press release: www.apsnet.org/about/newsro...

Read the original article in Phytopathology: doi.org/10.1094/PHYT...

The new extended deadline for MSA abstracts is March 21st! #MSAfungi25

Are you a member of @msafungi.bsky.social and employee of the US Federal Government who recently lost their job or who otherwise needs support during recent implementation of executive orders? We would like to connect with you to understand how the Society can help. Please DM to let us know.

Its #fungus time! Come join us in Madison this summer for #MSAfungi25 🧪🍄🔬 Abstracts due March 17

📣Call for Abstracts for the Mycological Society of America 2025 Annual Meeting this summer in Madison, Wisconsin. Submit your abstract by March 17th! #MSAfungi25

msa.joynconference.com/v2/

A campaign to match scientists who've been unjustly fired from federal positions with illustrators to tell their stories — this looks pretty neat

🚨 Washington State asked a judge yesterday to hold the Trump admin in contempt for canceling a grant to Seattle Children’s to study gender-affirming care.

“Injunctions are not suggestions — they are binding orders of the Court. Defendants may not evade this Court’s orders through game-playing.”

We show eukaryotic #HGT across >100 million years of evolution through simple co-culture: the fungal equivalent of taking yourself for a swim with a platypus and walking away with a new bill 🧪🍄🦆🚀 Great work everyone!

If you loved #ECFG17 (or had FOMO seeing posts of all the cool research) consider connecting with the fungal community virtually this summer at #CFN25 🍄

We'll be opening registration soon! Follow us to stay up to date!

this seems like an essential function to include :)

How do you find Starships in fungal genomes?

Starfish or course! ⭐🎣

Developed by @mycomile.bsky.social

#ecfg17 @fungage-lab.bsky.social

Try it out on your pezizo genome!

github.com/egluckthaler...

We are experiencing an assault on science unparalleled by anything I’ve seen in my life. It’s not one issue or another anymore, the entire institution is under attack by the most powerful individuals in the country.

This Friday, where will you be?

standupforscience2025.org

Huge thank you to the Cornell Plant Path grad students for inviting me out to meet and speak with them 🙏🧬🍄 uncertain times now, but seeing all their passion and drive gives me hope for the future of #science

Elon Musk has now illegally fired:

- USDA employees amidst a bird flu outbreak

- FAA chair amid a plane crash epidemic

- People in charge of protecting us from nuclear attack

At this point Musk has to be considered a terrorist attacking the United States.

@asm.org this better not be anticipatory obedience. I have 5 lab members planning on going to ASM microbe this year. I will absolutely pivot to another meeting if ASM gives in to anti-DEI efforts.

Following thermal adaptation, we investigated Zymoseptoria tritici's responses to extreme temperature stresses using transcriptomics and kmer-based GWAS.

🌡️🧬 Check out our findings in the preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Fungal phylogeny highlighting genome size changes

Summary of genome size variation among groups

@tbadet.bsky.social and I have a preprint out on transposon silencing in fungi!

Genome size evolution is fascinating and showcases the dynamic nature of transposon activation.

What we understand less are the dynamics of transposon defense systems encoded by the genomes.

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

From Lesions to Lessons: Two Decades of Filamentous Plant Pathogen Genomics | Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions® Filamentous plant pathogens pose a severe threat to food security. Current estimates suggest up to 23% yield losses to pre- and post-harvest diseases and these losses are projected to increase due to ...

From lesions to lessons:
2025 marks the 20th anniversary of filamentous plant pathogen genomics. In our new review, we present lessons we learned over the past 2 decades and discuss the future of plant pathogen genomics. Take a first look!

apsjournals.apsnet.org/doi/10.1094/...

What an awesome story! amazing to see so many connections with virulence factors 🤯🌱🚀

We're launching our Bluesky feed with Starships! Check out our December issue for a featured review on these gigantic transposable elements written by Emile Gluck-Thaler and colleagues.

There's plenty more inside the issue! The complete Table of Contents is here:
www.cell.com/trends/genet...

Excited to share our review on everything we know so far about #fungal #starships and new questions to take the field forward 🚀🍄 Great work team! @fungage-lab.bsky.social

Concept of a Starship transposon jumping out of a fungal culture. Illustration by Oen Gregory.

Thrilled to have our recent review on giant #fungal #transposons, called Starships, featured on the cover of Trends in Genetics! Accompanied by some fantastic artwork! With @mycomile.bsky.social. www.cell.com/trends/genet...

Emile Gluck-Thaler ‪Department of Plant Pathology, University of Wisconsin-Madison‬ - ‪‪Cited by 588‬‬ - ‪Genetics‬ - ‪Evolutionary genomics‬ - ‪Host-microbe interactions‬ - ‪Fungi‬

Hi Emily, could I please be added as a contributor? Thanks!
scholar.google.com/citations?us...
plantpath.wisc.edu/faculty/emil...

NEW Publication!😄

Here, we show how #PhyKIT — a broadly applicable toolkit for #phylogenomics — can be used to construct phylogenomic data matrices (& quantify biases therein), detect anomalies in predicted orthology, calculate gene-gene coevolution, & more!

🔗: tinyurl.com/yc5ja4xz

great idea Jacob! Could you please add me to the next list? @mycomile.bsky.social

Giant transposons promote strain heterogeneity in a major fungal pathogen bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

Do fungal Starships 🚀 matter for human health? We dive into the pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus and connect the dots between these unusual transposons and strain variability. Spoiler alert: biofilms, secondary metabolites and intra-strain variation, oh my! doi.org/10.1101/2024...