Benjamin Wolfe

A group of orange mushrooms growing in grass next to a dry-stone wall.

🍄🌱 Gardens can be fungal hotspots — if we let them! In this blog for #UKFungusDay, Jassy Drakulic @jassydrak.bsky.social at The RHS explores how garden practices can encourage (or suppress) fungi & why that matters for #SoilHealth & #Biodiversity. www.ukfungusday.co.uk/fungiingardens
#Gardening

These are experimental cheeses that are not for sale (yet!). But this science/craft collaboration highlights how the unintentional domestication in the Cellars at Jasper Hill Farm could lead to innovation in cheese production.

Stay tuned for more fun cheese microbial ecology and evolution! 🧀

Wheels of a Camembert-style cheese made with a white/mutant Penicillium solitum isolate. These cheeses are placed alongside plates of Penicillium solitum and the blue cheese Bayley Hazen Blue where the fungus was originally isolated.

I am also thrilled that our work has inspired the amazing team at Jasper Hill Farm to make new cheeses (bloomy rind cheese in top of the photo) with their locally-adapted Penicillium solitum isolates. This is different from the French strains of Penicillium camemberti that are typically used.

Nicolas also collected very cool data showing that white mutants have a fitness advantage over the green Penicillium solitum. But this advantage is only in the dark (with all lights off). We suspect that the dark cheese cave environment leads to relaxed selection for melanin production.

Super grateful for the amazing team in the @kellerlab.bsky.social who helped us make alb1 knockouts that clearly demonstrated how this gene controls pigmentation in Penicillium solitum.

Figure showing the types and locations of mutations/insertions in the alb1 gene of Penicillium solitum

There is a lot in the paper, and too much to unpack here (read it!). But my favorite part of the story is that transposable elements that insert just upstream of alb1 are likely causing a lot of the green --> white phenotypic shifts.

Researchers sampling the rinds of a blue cheese in a cheese cave

And so began the highly creative and integrative PhD project by @nicolasleonlouw.bsky.social to understand if/how Penicillium solitum was evolving in this cheese cave. The frozen samples from 2016 from the wedding proposal trip were an essential microbial time capsule for this work.

Timeline showing the transition of rinds of Bayley Hazen Blue cheese going from green to white from 2014 to 2024

We used images from social media and other sources to piece together a timeline of the Bayley Hazen Blue green-to-white transition from ~2014 to 2024.

Wheels of a blue cheese with white rinds

At the same time, we had been noticing (with lots of help from the amazing team of cheesemakers and affineurs!) that in the Jasper Hill cheese caves, the rinds of Bayley Hazen Blue were turning white!

New colours for old in the blue-cheese fungus Penicillium roqueforti - npj Science of Food npj Science of Food - New colours for old in the blue-cheese fungus Penicillium roqueforti

Alb1 is the first step in melanin biosynthesis for many fungi. When you alter or completely inactivate the alb1 gene in many fungi, you get white mutants, as Paul Dyer's group has previously demonstrated with Penicillium roqueforti. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A bright undergrad (Jackson Larlee) in a lab course that Nicolas and I were teaching noticed that in some white strains, there were mutations in a polyketide synthase gene. The genome was poorly annotated (at the time), but Jackson figured out that the gene was like alb1.

In some cases when you passaged the green Penicillium solitum on cheese curd agar in the lab, it would change from green to white over very short periods of time.

Flash forward to 2023 when @nicolasleonlouw.bsky.social was doing some experimental evolution in the lab with the fungus Penicillium solitum. It was isolated from the rind of Bayley Hazen Blue (was responsible for the green rind in 2016) and the fungus was doing some weird trait switching.

Wheels of the blue cheese Bayley Hazen Blue with a green fungus on the surface

Rachel said YES to Charlie's marriage proposal. And we collected a bunch of samples from the rinds of Bayley Hazen Blue cheese. At the time, the rinds of the cheese were bright green. I put the 2016 green rind samples in the -80 freezer and never tossed them out...

In 2016, I was part of a scheme to get Rachel Dutton (my post-doc advisor) up to the cheese caves at Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont. Her boyfriend (Charlie Kalish) wanted to propose to her where they met. I told Rachel we had important cheese rind samples to collect. She went along with it!

Long-term monitoring of a North American cheese cave reveals mechanisms and consequences of fungal adaptation Using a unique longitudinal sampling approach, Louw et al. demonstrate how a cheese-associated Penicillium population has adapted in an artisan cheese production facility in Vermont, USA. Adaptation i...

Such a delight to share our work on the evolution of a cheese rind fungus in @currentbiology.bsky.social.

This is the fantastic PhD work of @nicolasleonlouw.bsky.social and resulted from amazing collaborations, a wedding proposal(!), an undergrad course, & more!

🧵

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Cover of the BMS's Fungal Ecology journal

📣 Call for papers! Special issue of #FungalEcology on “Fungal conservation: from knowledge to actions” co-edited by Susana C. Gonçalves @cfemycolab.bsky.social & Jonathan Cazabonne @jonathancazabonne.bsky.social. Deadline for manuscripts: 31 Jan 2026. Find out more: www.linkedin.com/company/brit...

Thrilled to announce that the special issue on fungal #conservation that @cfemycolab.bsky.social and I are co-editing for the @britmycolsoc.org.uk c.org.uk journal Fungal Ecology is open for submissions!
www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

Twelve species of human parasites make up half of the literature on microbial eukaryotes Although microbial eukaryotes comprise the majority of eukaryotic phylogenetic diversity and inhabit nearly all ecosystems globally, most research focuses on only a few species of human parasites. Her...

New lab pre-print up! "Twelve species of human parasites make up half the literature on microbial eukaryotes"
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

We (led by UG Joanna Lepper and with @hbrappap.bsky.social) quantified all mentions of protist species in the scientific literature 🧵

#protistsonsky #microsky

We are on the lookout for postdocs for two different projects at the intersection of ecology, evolution, and the human microbiome.

See thread for more information and reach out!

Huge thanks to the amazing team at @currentbiology.bsky.social for highlighting fungi in this special issue. Many excellent reviews and perspectives from so many mycological heroes. Lots of great material to use in teaching/outreach. 🍄

We are hiring a postdoctoral scholar to join us in the sometime in the next ~6 months. oliveriolab.org with a focus on microbial eukaryotes in extreme environments.

Please email w/CV if you'd like to chat. Official ad soon.

#MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky #ProtistsOnSky

Schematic of lab and field experiments testing for yeast fitness with and without killer viruses. Panel A depicts a classical fitness assay in which a yeast with a virus (or cured of the virus) is cultured with a viral toxin-resistant reference strain and the number of doublings is compared between the two yeasts. Panel B diagrams field chambers made of 12-ml tubes in which a membrane holding yeast cells lines the mouth of the tube; the tube is then buried next to a tree. Panel C depicts a field experiment with the chambers. Yeasts hosting (or cured of) viruses are mixed with virus toxin-resistant reference cells, put onto chamber membranes, and incubated in soil for fifteen days. The relative ratios of tested and reference strains are then used as a proxy for fitness.

Check out my latest paper on fitness costs and benefits of hosting a killer virus if you're a yeast in the forest!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Embracing the systems complexity of microbial ecology and evolution: call for papers | mSystems Microbial ecology and evolution are broad disciplines that seek to understand the underlying processes that drive the diversification, distributions, and dynamics of microbial cells, populations, comm...

Send us your exciting microbial ecology and evolution manuscripts!

Embracing the systems complexity of microbial ecology and evolution: call for papers | mSystems journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Get in dorks, we're going protesting!

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE WITH US ON MARCH 7TH, 2025
WASHINGTON DC AND EVERY STATE CAPITOL

Because science is for everyone!

Find us at standupforscience2025.org

#standupforscience2025 #scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

Get in Dorks, we are going protesting.

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE. MARCH 7th 12-4pm. DC AND YOUR STATE CAPITALS.

More information to come.

Intraspecies associations from strain-rich metagenome samples https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.07.636498v1

a woman in a black and white jacket is sitting at a table in a diner . Alt: a woman in a black and white jacket is sitting at a table in a diner saying "There, I said it."

And Academic T&P committees, maybe take a beat & consider how the continuous & unsustainable push for CV conspicuous production has been a competitive inhibitor of scientists & scholars being engaged in their communities in meaningful ways as a bulwark to the shitstorm happening now.

That's how it's done! Nice and easy.
Good job Mycological Society of America.

Interested in doing a postdoc at the intersection of microbial ecology and agricultural engineering? We are recruiting for a collaborative project with me and Chris Voigt, Darcy McRose, Dave DesMarias, and Sixian You. See project announcement and reach out: jwafs.mit.edu/projects/202...