too many months cooped up in the lab separates myself from why I went into biology in the first place. Nature and biodiversity is so incredible and there’s nothing like camping to ground myself in why I chose to be a biologist

If you weren't at the Cellular and Molecular Fungal Biology Gordon Research Conference, I hope this helps you decide to go next time. It's such a great community! starring @grantnickles.bsky.social cinematography by @emmascales.bsky.social

Anna Lehmann, PhD candidate working in the Heitman Lab, found Aspergillus fumigatus can briefly duplicate chromosomes to survive antifungal treatment, then revert without a trace. https://medschool.duke.edu/news/phd-candidate-discovers-hidden-way-fungal-pathogen-may-resist-treatment

🍄 New study on #fungal #isocyanide synthases (#ICSs)! With @grantnickles.bsky.social @kellerlab.bsky.social (Uni. Wisconsin-Madison) @currentbiology.bsky.social @unipd.bsky.social Thanks all for the great teamwork! doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.…#Lichensns#SecondaryMetabolisms#biosyntheticGenese#fungigi

What is the origin of South Africa's invading #mushrooms? The 'fly agaric' is the famous red-and-white-spotted mushroom of fairy tales. But like all good stories, this fairy tale has a dark twist: the mushroom is invasive on multiple continents, including in Africa. youtu.be/ILLT154Byw0 🧵1/3

What an honor and privilege to organize #fungal26 with the one and only Meritxell Riquelme! Thank you fungal community and @genetics-gsa.bsky.social for making this such a great meeting !

What a way to end #fungal26 We laughed and we cried and we learned so much A great reminder to look back and reflect on the past It can light the way to the future Thank you Nancy Keller for being a light 🕯️ in the field

Our new paper on the evolution and chemical ecology of the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria; aka the Super Mario mushroom 🍄) in the Global South is out now in New Phytologist. Read the full paper here: nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... 🧵 1/5

Do you work with the Aspergillus fumigatus model isolates Af293 or CEA10? If so, we want to collaborate with you! In return for your lab's participation we will sequence your strain for free and provide co-authorship on the final paper. Learn more here: asp-fumi-seq-project-2025.vercel.app

(1/x) Yesterday will go down as one of the most monumental of my life.

Flight attendant: Is there a doctor on the plane? Me: Yes, but I'm not that kind of… Flight attendant: The pilots want to know about marine CO₂ removal and its role as a climate solution. Me: AT LAST!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... new preprint on predicting antifungal drug resistance in yeasts is out!

Hello friends and colleagues! I'm giving my public defense on May 28th from 10-11am CST. Zoom link: uwmadison.zoom.us/j/99000991657 I'll be talking about the three different first-author papers from my PhD. For sneak previews of those chapters scroll down for the thread! 👇

New publication with the Huttenlocher Lab! Led by PhD candidate Nayanna Mercado Soto, we used zebrafish to study burn wound infections with Candida albicans & Aspergillus fumigatus, showing the innate immune response is highly conserved across fungal species. #fungi journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

How it feels being a Wisconsin Susan Crawford voter waiting for the election results

Excited to share that work from my PhD is now available in @natmetabolism.bsky.social! Here, we uncover a link between heme production, BCAA metabolism, and thermogenesis—implicating heme synthesis in #aging, #obesity, and #T2D. Link to paper: urldefense.com/v3/__https:/... A Thread (1/15)

To the PIs that take the time to find grad students at conferences with posters, you are appreciated!! Hearing someone else get amped about my work reminds me why I do science 🥰

I’m in San Diego for the SIMB Natural Product Discovery and Development in the Genomic Era conference. Excited to hear about the research going on in other labs and to make new connections :)

Never a doubt in my mind that Charli was taking it this year

Online @cellpress.bsky.social, we reveal a protein shell that helps diatoms fix 20% of global #CO2 🧪🌊🌾🧶🧬🌍 Shimakawa et al: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Nam et al: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... @biozentrum.bsky.social press release: www.biozentrum.unibas.ch/news/detail/... Read on for more... 1/🧵

It’s crazy that 90% of the R&D bioinformatics jobs I’m seeing now require ML and AI development expertise while simultaneously advanced PhDs in biology or data science. If I had to guess only 5-10% of PhD level bioinformaticians actually know how to make advanced ML models.

We did this crazy project where we tried to see if proteins could interact with their mirror image ligand. Seems impossible when proteins need to form 3D structures to interact. But what about if the interaction remains disordered??? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It’s out!! We subjected soils from 30 different locations across Europe to extreme events and found that soil fungal and bacterial communities showed consistent responses that could be predicted from their origin! With @knightjar.bsky.social and many collaborators! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sure this will be super useful going forward for benchmarking and discovery 'MassSpecGym is the largest publicly available dataset of high-quality labeled MS/MS spectra' arxiv.org/html/2410.23...

If you are new to 🦋 and are interested in microbial natural products - here’s some starter packs to help connect us go.bsky.app/72NeGsT and go.bsky.app/4xnRN52 - there’s also one set up by @danudwary.secondarymetabolism.com here go.bsky.app/Q9svkYf

Hi 🦋! My name is Grant Nickles, 5th year PhD student studying fungal natural products in the Keller lab @ UW-Madison. More specifically, I've been developing genome mining strategies to investigate poorly characterized non-canonical fungal pathways. academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

If you've ever wondered why most new housing in America looks like the image on the left, rather than being more interesting and architecturally diverse like the building on the right, I have one explanation: single stair building codes 🧵

Pretending I have my year in review with these monthly stats.fm summaries. Charlie is taking my top artist of 2024 I fear

48% is SO high 😭. God I don’t envy climate and public health scientists over the next 4 years. They’re science policies strongest soldiers

There are natural products, and there are natural-ish products:

Imposter syndrome making me too nervous to ask to be added to a science starter pack as just a smol grad student

what I’m all about (dog and 🏳️‍🌈 )

remember: this app has no ads ✨

Had the opportunity to share my science on fungal natural products in a statewide communications competition. Congrats to all of the other fantastic finalists! Grateful to take home the 2nd place prize 😄. You can view my winning submission here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uwx...

0/3 on industry job applications, it’s a tough time to be a fungal natural product scientist but I’m smiling through the pain. Maybe this is my sign to post doc *sigh*