cc  >> Hi, everyone, welcome to  Wednesday Nite at the Lab  here at the UW-Madison  Biotechnology Center.  Today we have Mark Staudt  talking about fungi, so I think  there's gonna be a lot you're  gonna learn today about the  world of fungus.  And just a little bit of  background on Mark, he did his  bachelor's in engineering,  actually, at the University of  Texas and worked as an engineer  for a few years before he moved  into the biology world and came  here for graduate school.  He is currently finishing up his  graduate work in the lab of  Christina Hull here at  Wisconsin, and his work is  looking at one of the fungal  pathogens, cryptococcus.  And he also is a fellow in the  Nap House which is a house here  on campus for graduate fellows  in different areas, from arts to  science, to interact.  So, welcome him to Wednesday  Nite at the Lab today.  (applause)  >> Thanks.  Is this on?  Volume okay?  Okay, great.  So, like Kathleen said, my  name's Mark Staudt, I'm in the  department of biomolecular  chemistry, but I work with  Christina Hull as my advisor, so  I'm in the Hull lab.  And today I want to talk to you  about fungi, and really, how  fungi, a lot of the good they  do, but also some of the bad  they do. 

 Because like Kathleen was  saying, I came to the biological  side from an engineering  background.  So I worked in chemical plants  down south for a while, and so  for me, really, all I knew about  fungi was maybe what a lot of  you guys think about it.  It's just this.  You know, I looked at mushrooms,  if I had one in my salad, if I  saw one in the forest.  That was a fungi, and that was  probably the last I thought of  it.  Except for maybe, I don't  remember if it was junior high  or high school, but they  actually, when they went through  the classical five kingdoms, was  the other time I saw fungi  mentioned.  It's unique that fungi actually  used to be part of the plant  kingdom, because a long time  ago, they looked at fungi and  they grew out of the soil, they  didn't move, and they kind of  looked like plants.  At least, the mushrooms did.  So they just grouped them in  with plants.  And it wasn't until later that  fungi had their own kingdom. 

 But now, actually, we estimate  that actually 1.5 million  species are in the  fungal kingdom, so that's really  a pretty large kingdom.  And also with the advance in  molecular technologies, what  they've seen is that fungi are  actually more closely related,  and I'll try out this pointer  with the mouse here.  Okay.  So when I'm trying to point to  stuff, we're gonna be looking  for this little black arrow up  here.  But they actually found that  fungi are actually more closely  related to the animal kingdom  than they are to plants.  And that's gonna come into play  later in the talk, when I talk  about how fungi are involved  with our own bodies.  Another reason I think that  fungi possibly are maybe a  little misunderstood is that  they go by so many names.  You can see a lot of them here,  over on the left we have yeast,  that a lot of people have  probably cooked bread with, to  make leavened bread.  Over on the right we have  these nasty-looking critters,  we have mildew, mold.  Down here we have mushrooms,  which we're more  familiar with, the Smurfs  definitely love them to live in,  make them homes. 

 Over here we have a truffle,  which actually, amazingly  enough, is a lot of times worth  more than its weight in gold.  That they're so valuable to  gourmet cooks.  And this guy was probably the  closest I could come to  something that might look like  a rust, a smut, or a chytrid.  But we'll talk about those more  later.  The whole idea of this slide is  just that when you hear these  words, like mildew, mold, yeast,  truffles, stuff like this, these  are all fungi we're talking  about.  So whether you're just hearing  them in the news, or just maybe  talking among your friends, I  probably talk a little bit more  about them than you guys might,  but if it comes up, these are  all fungi we're talking about,  all these different names.  But for the purposes of this  talk, I really want to get  across what our relationship  with fungi is.  And kind of in three main areas.  First, what our relationship  with fungi is in the  environment.  Secondly, what it is in the food  chain, and then finally, also  what it is in our own bodies. 

 But how fungi interacts in all  these instances, like I said,  both in good ways, and perhaps,  in maybe not-so-positive ways.  So first, looking at the  environment.  This is kind of an interesting  tidbit.  Again, going back to when I was  in, I don't know if it was grade  school, but back in the day,  when they always talked about  large organisms, they always  looked at stuff like blue whales  or redwood trees.  Well, it turns out, a fungus,  they're always forgotten about,  the fungi, but we're actually  the largest organism in the  world.  In the Blue Ridge mountains in  Oregon, there's actually a  single fungus that covers four  square miles.  I mean, that's pretty  incredible, that's over 1600  football fields.  That this one organism goes  over.  And you can see here, in this  person's hand right here, those  are the filaments that are going  underneath the soil throughout  these four square miles.  And then at different points,  these fruiting bodies, the  mushrooms, actually pop up. 

 But they've actually done  genetic testing, that over this  entire four square miles, this  is all the same organism.  Genetically the same, one  enormous thing, so blue whales  have got nothing on the fungus.  But actually more importantly,  that's an interesting tidbit, a  more interesting, or more  important thing that fungi do in  the forest is actually two  things.  One, they form mycorrhizae that  help plants grow, and the second  is they actually decompose a lot  of the organic materials in the  forests around the world.  But first to get to what  mycorrhizae are, over here on  the left you can see, these are,  the bottom two pictures are  actually, the yellowish parts  are actually the roots, and the  mycorrhizae are the symbiotic  relationship between plants,  plant roots, and the fungi.  What symbiotic means is that  they both are helping each other  out.  The plant provides food for the  fungus in the form of sugars,  and then the fungus helps to be  able to get together a lot of  minerals, particularly nitrogen,  as well as water, to help the  plants grow better.  Then you can see up top, in that  picture with the two plants,  these are actually a redwood  sapling, and on the left, this  smaller one, was grown after  they removed all the  mycorrhizae, removed the fungi  interaction from this plant.  And on the right was a normal  one that was growing with this  fungal interaction.  And you can see that the one on  the right is a much more robust  plant, you see a lot better  growth. 

 And it's been estimated that  about 90% of the plants on earth  have these interactions with  this fungi, has this  mycorrhizae.  And so you can imagine the  impact worldwide of these, of  this interaction with the fungi  that it has on all plant life  here on earth.  The other thing on the right  side that we see fungi doing is  actually decomposing all this  organic matter.  You can see different states of  it, this one is called "white  rot," its Latin name is  "phanerochaete."  Then we see different ones on  degrading wood, and fungi as  we'll talk about a little bit,  it doesn't know the difference  whether that wood is your house  or whether it's a tree.  It's still gonna decompose it  one way or the other.  And while this may not be a  super attractive thing to look  at, it's actually hugely  important, because what it does  is, the fungi recycle this  carbon that otherwise would be  dead and not useful, it recycles  it back into the environment.  So that organisms can then use  that carbon to grow new  organisms, to grow us and other  plants and animals.  And then the other side of that  is also, if you think about it,  if fungi didn't degrade all this  stuff and rot it all down, we  would be under, I'm pretty sure,  literally miles and miles of  dead organisms.  Realistically, we wouldn't be  here, right?  But if we were, we would be  under miles of dead plants, dead  animals, and everything else if  the fungi weren't here to  decompose all that and return it  back into the environment.  So with this idea that fungi  degrade a lot of stuff, you may  have heard a lot of talk about  biofuels. 

 Because one of the enzymes, or  the proteins that these  organisms have to be able to  break down this wood are also  going to be useful in the making  of biofuels because they're able  to break down this plant  material into other, smaller  chemical structures.  And while you've probably also  heard, there are potential  pitfalls with biofuels.  You know, we have to do this  right, we have to look at what  we're doing and think about it.  And a lot of that work to make  better technologies, to mature  this technology that we're gonna  get the actual benefit we want  out of it, and to design some of  the plants themselves that will  help with this.  A lot of that work is being done  right here on campus, here at  this Great Lakes Bioenergy  Research Center.  This is actually a really big  grant out of the Department of  Defense that the University of  Wisconsin got, partly because of  our strength within the  scientific community but also  because Wisconsin is uniquely  positioned with so much farmland  and so many different types of  crops, to be able to look at and  take advantage of some of the  attributes of these different  plants.  So these enzymes that degrade  stuff will also become  important, hopefully looking  toward the biofuels, and  hopefully getting a little bit  of energy independence  within the U.S.  and the world altogether.  And so you can see, I'm probably  a little biased in favor of the  fungi, but you know, like I  said, they also do bad things,  although I would propose at  least on some of these that  fungi don't know better.  Like I said, they don't know if  it's your house, they're just  decomposing, they're rotting  stuff, they're just doing their  thing. 

 So it happens to be your house,  inconvenient for you.  But you can imagine situations  where this becomes a larger  problem than normal.  I'm sure you guys have heard a  lot about the different  hurricanes that have been  hitting the Gulf coast.  I think this is a picture of  Katrina, but I'm actually  particularly intimated with the  hurricanes in the Gulf coast  because, let's see, where's my  pointer?  It's easier for me to look at  the screen, but if you can see  it up there, my hometown is  about right here, if y'all can  see.  So all these hurricanes have  been running over my hometown  for the last two or three years.  In fact, Rita was the one that  passed directly over my hometown  and my house.  In fact, we had flooding in our  house, we had all these  different kinds of rots,  and mildews building up.  So it does cause a large problem  when you see areas, of course,  we were very lucky, everything's  gotten back together, everybody  was okay, but you can see, and  you've seen pictures in the news  of New Orleans.  Where they were under so much  water, and then, under these  conditions, damp, heated  conditions, the mildew and fungi  just move on in and start  rotting this stuff down, they're  taking care of business.  From the side of New Orleans,  kind of a bad thing. 

 So another place that, it's  pretty amazing that fungi  are actually working,  they're actually degrading  the astronaut's house.  The Mir space station actually  has fungus growing on this  bottom left panel, on the  outside of the space station,  which is really amazing.  They didn't think anything was  able to grow out in space, it's  super cold, what are they using  for energy, all these type of  things.  And they assume it just got  carried from earth up there, but  some studies have shown, when  you might think, how do they get  their energy to be able to grow  in space?  I mean, there's nothing really  there, they don't have soil,  they don't have other plants or  animals.  There's actually some studies  that show, or at least suggest,  that they might actually be able  to use ionizing radiation to  actually use that as an energy  source to produce their energy.  So there's ionizing radiation  out in space.  Another place they see fungi  growing where they wouldn't  necessarily expect anything to  grow is in the old reactors at  Chernobyl, the big nuclear  meltdown that happened in  Russia, or I guess, Soviet Union  at that time.  I'm not sure if it actually was  in Russia, but over in the  Soviet Union, they had a big  meltdown with a nuclear reactor,  and in that nuclear reactor is  this unbelievably flourishing,  huge fungal colony.  And so this ionizing radiation  idea is quite controversial, so  it hasn't by any means been  proven, but it's gonna be an  interesting story to see how  these organisms are actually  surviving in places that you  would never expect to find life.  But I think it just goes to show  how widespread fungi are. 

 And their abilities to adapt to  different situations.  Oh, and when thinking of bad  things, I guess the one group  that could really hate on the  fungi are the amphibians.  They're getting a pretty raw  deal here.  Initially amphibians, I'm not  sure if you guys may have read  in some of the papers a while  back, but amphibians are really  going through a lot of problems,  they're having, they're being  wiped out in a lot of locations  all over the world.  But they're having all these  developmental problems.  Here you can see, one's growing  without legs, this one doesn't  have an eye, lots of problems in  their development.  These are even ones that make it  that far.  You can imagine a lot of them  just die in their development  and don't even make it to at  least a partially formed  organism.  And at first, they thought what  was happening to the amphibians  was something kind of like the  canary in the coal mine, the  idea that the amphibians' skin,  they absorb chemicals, sorry,  but they absorb chemicals  directly through their skin.  So they thought maybe it was  pollutants being released out  into the environment, and that  these amphibians were our first  canary in the coal mine, our  first signal that, "Oh goodness,  we've put too much pollution  into the environment," something  bad's happening here. 

 But actually when scientists  went and looked at what was  happening, the pollution levels  at these different locations  actually wasn't that bad, it was  nothing that would harm the  amphibians.  But what they did find were  these chytrids, and this is a  chytrid right here.  That's a group of fungi, it's  often classified as what is  thought to be the oldest group  of fungi.  So evolutionary speaking, one of  the primary fungi that other  ones were derived from.  But one of the unique  characteristics of this chytrid  is that it has motile gametes,  or spores, so they can  actually swim.  So you can think, in a water  environment where these  amphibians are, they can easily  get to the amphibians and then  infect them and cause all these  developmental problems.  So now that they've kind of  identified that the chytrids are  what's causing all these  problems, that in fact  it wasn't the pollution.  They're trying to figure out  why this chytrid  is an increasing problem.  As well as possible solutions.  Some of the ideas of why it  might be a problem are possible  climate change, is a possible  warming of the earth making  different environmental niches  that chytrids can now move into,  where normally they wouldn't be  there, but now because of some  shift in either the rainfall or  the temperature, they can now  inhabit these environments which  then cause very detrimental  effects to the amphibians. 

 Another idea is also that just  humans, like we do a lot, even  we've seen, Kathleen mentioned  the Swine flu.  How quickly, because we travel  everywhere across the globe so  quickly, either in our planes,  in our boats, everything we do,  even what's stuck to our shoes,  we transport these things.  Organisms, microorganisms  especially, everywhere.  And is it actually human,  unintentional human interactions  that are spreading these  chytrids to different  populations and endangering  amphibians worldwide.  So hopefully they'll figure  something out, but a lot of  research is going into trying to  figures out what these chytrids  are doing, how we can stop it,  and hopefully not have the  amphibians kind of wiped off the  face of the earth.  So like I said, those are some  bad things, but we're back to  coming into looking at a  different relationship with  fungi.  So we kind of talked about it in  the environment, you can think  of kind of the next step as  we're moving to ourselves, as it  comes out of the environment, as  it comes to us through the food  chain.  And again, for me at least, and  I should also say, I should've  said this in the beginning, but  if you have any questions or any  thoughts, you can throw them out  any time, so you don't have to  save them for the end or  anything, just go ahead and  throw them out.  But at least at this point,  we're moving into the food  chain.  So you can think of, it's  directly coming from the  environment, we grow things, we  eat it. 

 And again for me, the first  thing I thought of, before I  moved into the lab that studied  fungi, was these guys.  You know, fungi that we eat.  And I love this little quote I  stumbled across, that "All  mushrooms are edible, but some  only once," unfortunately, so  you gotta watch what you're  doing.  Actually, out of all these, all  of them are edible more than  once, except for this guy over  in the corner, this is actually  called the "death cap" mushroom.  You can probably guess why,  because it's poisonous and it  will kill you.  So you can see, though, it  doesn't look much different.  This pointer's killing me, but  it doesn't look much different  than these button cap mushrooms  that you see in the grocery  store all the time.  So while there aren't a whole  lot of species of fungi that are  necessarily that poisonous to  human, they're relatively  abundant in a forest, if you  weren't an expert, you  definitely wouldn't want to go  out there and start picking  things and licking them or  throwing them in your salad,  because you never know what you  might end up with.  So definitely leave it to the  experts.  And speaking of experts, humans  spend a lot of time and money,  it's a fairly large industry, I  didn't get an economic figure,  but I believe it's at least in  the billions, actually farming  mushrooms. 

 And this actually took a lot of  work, it's difficult to recreate  the conditions to have a good  fungus farm.  But while humans have been  working on this for a relatively  short time, and have had  reasonable success with it, ants  have actually been doing it a  long time.  Which is a pretty amazing thing  to me.  Oops, I skipped a slide.  So these are leaf cutter ants,  and they're in the tropics, down  in South America.  And what they do is they cut up  all these leaves and they bring  them all back to their nest, and  then the different take on ant  farms, they actually have farms  of fungi that they grow.  Then you can see here, they kind  of have a little cycle going,  that the ants provide fertilizer  and feed the fungi with these  plants and bringing back the  organic material for them to  grow and then the ants actually  eat the fungus, so again,  another symbiotic relationship  that they're helping each other  out.  And actually, in this pretty  neat food web, it actually gets  more complex, there's actually  bacteria involved that will help  protect the fungi and then the  ants actually provide some of  this bacteria.  And it gets to be a pretty  intricate and pretty amazing web  of food chain.  And actually, here on campus, a  lot of the work was done here by  Dr. Cameron Currie, in the  Department of Bacteriology. 

 He's done some amazing work on  this food web right here and  actually has gotten, I think at  least one or two papers in  "Science," so some really  interesting and really stuff  that nobody expected when they  were looking at these things.  But bottom line, we're not the  only ones that farm fungi.  Ants have beat us to it for a  long time.  And so not only are fungi part  of the food chain themselves,  you know, we eat mushrooms, so  they're directly part of it.  But they're also required for  the production of many foods.  You know, even here in  Wisconsin, where would as  Wisconsin, as a transplant, if  you didn't have beer and you  didn't have cheese, I mean, what  would Wisconsin be?  I don't know, a bunch of cows,  I guess, that don't give milk.  But that's definitely the two  characteristics I noticed when I  came here, cheese curds, good  beer, you gotta love it.  But fungi aren't involved in  making all cheeses, actually,  but they are involved in making  what you think of as the moldy,  or the smelly cheeses, maybe  some of the more gourmet  cheeses, and it's actually the  molds they put in there, so  stuff like Roquefort or blue  cheese.  Those actually are putting fungi  in, to make them more pungent.  And then, of course, like I said  at the beginning, a lot of you  guys are probably familiar with  yeast, that we use in bread and  everything, to form food. 

 As well as fermentation  products, beer, you guys are  familiar with, as well as wine,  also uses fungi.  And one at least I wasn't  familiar with was soy sauce, is  also a fermentation product  from fungi.  And actually, Kikkoman is a  producer of soy sauce.  And again, I didn't even know  soy sauce was involved with  fungi till just a couple years  ago, but here in the new  microbial sciences building,  which is right over this way on  Linden, if you pass it on  campus.  They actually gave a couple  million dollars to have a  fermentation lab, the Kikkoman  Fermentation Lab here on campus.  So they're still actively  looking for ways to improve  these things, even though these  ideas of fermentation with  fungi, especially beer and wine,  have been around for millennia,  actually.  But some of the new ways,  like I said, these have been  here for a long time.  Some of the newer ways that  we're also looking at fungi  indirectly getting into the food  system is actually what we call  "mico-proteins," so "mico" is  just "fungal," so fungal  proteins.  But they're starting to develop  some of these as meat  alternatives.  Whether people want to do it for  health reasons, possibly for  sustainability reasons, and  possibly just for taste. 

 We actually are getting a lot of  mico-proteins, one brand  is Quorn, spelled "Q-U-O-R-N.  They make a lot of stuff,  they'll make some stuff like  tofu, that you can just throw on  the stir fry, but they'll also  make chicken nuggets you can fry  up, chicken nuggets.  The fake chicken, obviously,  it's mico-proteins.  But two things, with health it's  good, but also, you can actually  grow these in large vats, and I  think especially as this  technology develops, it's a food  source that, especially compared  to meat, which is rather hard on  the environment, resource-wise,  could actually probably provide  a lot of food and a lot of  protein resources for possibly a  lot of potentially impoverished  nations around the world.  So right now it's seen more as,  at least in the US, it's  marketed more as a high-end  product, like, you'd probably  have to go to Whole Foods to  find Quorn.  But potentially, and hopefully,  it will actually be able to  impact, like I said, possibly  non-nourished or impoverished  nations down the road because it  can be grown in such large  amounts, and fairly cheaply.  And then I think, too, just  because fungi get a bad name,  they had to come up with some  clever way to call it "Quorn" or  something, they're not gonna  tell you you're eating fungus,  right?  They're gonna come up with a  clever marketing scheme and  hopefully sell it to you that  way.  But, hopefully people will get  over that, also.  So those are some of the good  ways, of course now we're  flipping back to the bad side.  Of course, fungi can also mess  up the storage and production of  many foods. 

 I'm sure all of us here have  left bread out too long, that we  get some of this mold,  Aspergillus, on it.  Aspergillus are these white,  kind of fuzzy things, and they   sometimes get green in the  center.  But that's a fungi, just, again,  come in, left your bread out,  it's gonna take care of  business, it's gonna start  taking it down.  So that's what's happening with  those guys.  And then, also, even in the  production of food.  You can see here, like on  strawberries, that's actually a  powdery mildew on them, but of  course, it's very bad for  strawberry production.  Over here we have barley that's  been infected with ergot, which  also is another plant pathogen.  And over here might be the best  example of fungi, with my talk  title that I had to make up  quick, is it good or is it bad?  This is actually --- is the name  of the fungus that is infected,  and this is a cornstalk, and  these little things are  individual kernels of corn, that  normally would be those nice  little yellow kernels of corn  that have been infected with  this fungus, and are actually  filled with spores, and fungus.  And sometimes to the point of  bursting.  So when we get this in American  fields, this is a bad thing. 

 But actually, in Mexico, this is  considered a delicacy.  So they actually, in fact, in  Mexico stores, you can find it  actually canned here in the US.  You probably won't find fresh--  Goodness, did I do something?  I don't know what happened.  Okay, as long as everybody's  okay, I'm good.  But I think I was saying that  you're gonna have trouble  finding fresh, and I'm not even  gonna try to say the word,  I would butcher it.  It's some Aztec word.  If you ask me after, I could  email it to you.  But if I try to say it, it would  be not-recognizable.  But it's a delicacy in Mexico,  whereas here, it's considered a  very bad thing.  And actually, all of these, we  spend a lot of time and energy  spraying our crops, to try to  prevent these fungal pathogens  from infecting our different  crops. 

 And hopefully getting them to  the food market without any of  these things happening.  Before I move on, there was just  another little side note,  interesting over here, on ergot,  is actually a fungus that,  actually, LSD can come from  ergot, that's where they get it.  So you can decide whether it's  good or bad when you think back  to the '60s, Lucy in the Sky  with Diamonds, a bunch of that  stuff was floating around.  But also, another interesting  historical side note, was the  idea of witches and witch  trials.  There's been a fairly  convincing, I haven't read a lot  about it, but it looked like  they, I don't want to say "did  their homework," but it looks  fairly convincing.  When they go back and look at  historical records, a lot of the  witch trials actually merge with  these expected times of ergot  infestation of barley.  So one of the side effects, if  you eat barley that's infested  with this fungus, is you would  go into hallucinations, like   LSD, you would go into  convulsions, a lot of these  things that might be associated  with witches.  And they've looked at the times  of the water fall through  history and stuff, and the  prices of barley that likely was  going through an ergot  infestation, and worldwide, in  Salem and in other places in  Europe, they found a pretty good  correlation that what was likely  happening was ergot was  infecting this barley and then  people started having these  symptoms of convulsions and  hallucinations, everybody  thought witches.  All of a sudden, bad things are  happening, and a witch hunt  starts.  So fungi can even impact  history, indirectly, through  some of their actions. 

 But back to the food chain, not  only can it mess up the  production of some of these  crops, but it can also affect  these crops through what we call  secondary metabolize.  Basically things as they grow  that seep out of the organism  and into the area.  So it's not the organism itself,  but it's things that are  released from the organism.  And this toxin over here, called  "Aflatoxin," actually comes from  this Aspergillus flavus, which  can grow on corn.  But actually, Aflatoxin is one  of the nastiest ones of these,  it's actually, I don't think  they've come out with anything  more, it used to be the most  carcinogenic thing known to man.  And definitely, if they've come  up with something else, it's  definitely in the top things of  carcinogenic compounds.  And this can affect food  supplies when it goes into feed  stocks for animals.  In fact, one year, I don't  remember the date or anything,  but they talk about turkey X  disease, I think it was over in  England.  I forget if it was in the east  coast of the United States as  well.  But they didn't know what was  killing all these turkeys, all  these turkeys were dying  everywhere, you could hardly get  a turkey for Thanksgiving. 

 But they finally found, it was  actually the Aflatoxin that had  gotten into the feed stocks, the  grain that they were giving to  the animals, and it was killing  all the animals.  So luckily that was a while  back, before you get too  worried, because the other thing  that might more directly enter  the human food chain is through  peanut butter.  Actually, Aspergillus grows  quite well on the dunes, and  peanuts.  So if they aren't stored  properly, you could get  Aspergillus growing, which, as  it grows, one of its byproducts  is Aflatoxin.  But luckily we're well aware of  this.  Food storage has improved  tremendously and they test for  this is in all our food  products, so it's nothing that  we really need to worry about,  other than to be aware and make  sure that the proper precautions  are taken.  >> Was that the one that got  the Jif peanut butter?  >> I think that was salmonella,  from what I remember in the  news, which is a different  organism.  And luckily so, because  Aflatoxin, I don't know if it  would've been worse directly,  salmonella may hit you faster,  Aflatoxin may hit you later.  But luckily it wasn't Aflatoxin.  But it is something to be aware  of, when you read these things,  that hopefully all these food  producers are doing their jobs,  and most of them do do a very  good job of keeping track  because anything, when you make  it in large quantities, things  can happen, like the salmonella,  like Aflatoxin. 

 Yes, sir.  >> Are you aware of any cancer  outbreaks attached to Aflatoxin?  >> Yeah, he had asked if I'm  aware of any cancer outbreaks  with Aflatoxin.  And I don't think there are,  because they were aware that it  was so cancerous, in fact, I  think it was unusual, that's why  they called it turkey X disease  for a while, because it didn't  even cross their mind, because  they knew to store it properly,  and I guess something happened  in the mismanagement of that  grain.  But normally they're quite aware  of it, so they take precautions  to prevent it.  And as well, with the animals,  where they have seen some  Aflatoxin breakouts, it doesn't  get to the point of cancer, it  more directly kills them, I'm  not sure of the mechanism, but  that's why all the turkeys died,  it wasn't necessarily from  cancer.  Interesting question.  Yeah?  >> Is Aflatoxin just a cancer  problem?  >> You know, I should know more  about that.  He was asking if Aflatoxin is  only a cancer problem.  I know it does tend to go to the  liver, our liver is kind of used  as a filter for a lot of toxins  that go through our body, so  that's where it builds up,  that's where it causes a lot of  these problems.  I'm not sure if there's an  acute, I haven't read of any  acute Aflatoxin poisonings in  humans. 

 But then, I haven't read a whole  lot about it, to be honest.  >> I used to work for like,  Best Foods, and Skippy  peanut butter.  This guy I worked with,  he won the golden peanut award.  Anyway, what happens is,  to every peanut they put a light  on it, and if it fluoresces,  it gets kicked out.  >> Amazing, yeah.  >> So that's back in 1970 or  before.  >> Yeah, that's a great way to  do it.  It's actually, I wasn't  necessarily going to mention it,  but it kind of makes you think  in the same way, of actually, in  some ways, because these large  productions, a lot of times we  associate organic with safer  stuff, so not to necessarily  scare you or anything, but in  some ways when you have the  peanuts that are just stored in  those bins in organic places,  that just sit there for maybe  months, how long, that could  have stuff growing on them.  They don't go through the same  tests, like you said, when they  check every peanut that goes  through this place.  So some people might argue that  when you make your fresh peanut  butter, you actually run a  little higher risk than you  would from actually buying Jif  or some different type of  commercial peanut butter. 

 That's pretty interesting stuff,  the way they keep track of all  that.  Anything else?  Good questions, keep them  coming.  Because now we're gonna actually  move into the stuff that's  probably nearest and dearest to  my heart, I guess, hopefully not  literally, but it's fungi in the  human body.  And here are, again, the good  and the bad.  These fungal toxins that just a  second ago I was telling you how  cancerous they can be, and how  they can harm a lot of animals.  They can also do a world of good  for humans.  Alexander Fleming, most of you  guys have probably heard about,  really discovered what I think  would be called the first  miracle drug, penicillin.  And he found it by looking at  fungi, it was one of those  accidental discoveries, he was  about to throw out a dish and he  actually noticed that the fungi  had actually killed some of the  bacteria on that dish before he  tossed it out.  He went back and looked at it,  and penicillin is what he found.  But these secondary metabolites,  that I was talking about, these  things that some of these fungi  excrete, a lot of them are used  as defense mechanisms, and since  a lot of these fungi are growing  in the soil, one of the things  they're at least exposed to  often is actually bacteria. 

 So some of these secondary  metabolites, while some can be  bad, some actually kill bacteria  because that would be a natural  competitor in the environment.  And that's exactly where we get  a lot of our antibiotics, where  penicillin came from, was from a  fungi.  And I don't think it'd be  overstating to say that probably  the majority of us in this room  are probably here because of  penicillin, either, whether it  affected us directly or whether  it possibly affected our parents  or grandparents, especially  through the wars and stuff like  that.  It's saved really countless,  countless lives.  And even with the idea of  antibacterial resistance, which  is building up, penicillin  itself, and the derivatives that  have made it more potent,  penicillin with small  adjustments to it, it's still  doing a world of good, and, I  mean, basically every day we get  in the hospital.  When you think surgery, it used  to be a really scary  proposition.  Anything that happens on the  battlefield.  Bacteria will come in and they  will just start decimating the  human body.  Now we can actually kill these  things, which is really amazing.  Along with antibacterials,  which, like I said, could be  argued as one of the biggest  revolutions in medicine we've  had, there's other drugs that  come from these secondary  metabolites. 

 Cyclosporin A, is one that can  help suppress immune system,  if you ever had an organ  transplant or something like  this, to make sure your body  doesn't reject it, they can give  you that.  There's ergot alkaloids, again  are coming from that plant ergot  where you get LSD, so it can  also be used, I'm not sure quite  what for, I guess an alkaloid,  but I don't the actual chemistry  behind it.  But they can also be used to  treat migraines, so it does have  this affect on the brain.  And then also statins, some of  you guys may be familiar with,  as used in cardiovascular-type  situations.  So a lot of good comes from  these toxins as well.  And not only are fungi able to  produce these secondary  metabolites just through their  normal growth, we've now reached  a point in our knowledge and  technology that we can actually  use fungi basically as little  factories so that we can  genetically engineer them and  use them to make therapeutics  that we need in large  quantities.  So insulin is a great example of  this.  Insulin used to be collected  from actual animals.  They would grind up organs, and  collect insulin, so you can  imagine this made insulin very  expensive as well as, they had a  lot of problems with purity, and  stuff like this, getting back to  this, when you're doing it in  large quantities, who knows what  happens when you're grinding up  all these organs, especially if  that animal may have been  infected with something else.  So now that we have the  technology to use fungi to  engineer a system where the  fungi to grow, this is just an  example of essentially what  would be a bioreactor, a reactor  that has living things within  it. 

 We can actually produce insulin,  as an example here, we can  produce large quantities of  insulin, basically, I don't know  that it's limited, you can  probably produce as much as you  want as long as there's a market  for it.  You can produce it cheaply, at  least as compared to harvesting  it from animals.  So much, much cheaper, and it's  also at a much greater purity,  so you don't have to worry about  what you're putting into your  body as much.  So this was really great,  especially now in the nation,  where we think of the rise of  type 2 diabetes.  That this, and I'm sure future  therapeutics as well, that we  can actually engineer these  organisms to make this for us in  large quantities at a fairly  cost-effective rate.  And then we kind of enter into  maybe a neutral idea of fungi.  Like bacteria, a lot of  microorganisms, there are tons  of microorganisms on us, so  fungi are one of these as well,  just like we have bacteria.  There's been some estimates,  actually, that by the time we  die, there's actually more mass  of microbes on us, or in us, on  us and in us, than there  actually is mass of human cells.  So it kind of makes you almost  reevaluate what it is to be  human, if we're more microbes  that are living with us and on  us.  But for the most part, they just  live on us, no problem, they're  just there, not causing good or  bad things. 

 But of course, I'm sure you guys  are familiar, that you can have  fungal disease.  And fungal disease can affect  anybody, of course, in fact,  probably everybody in this room  at some point in your life will  run across some form of fungal  disease, either you or somebody  you know.  These are just some of the  common ones, there's hundreds of  species that can cause fungal  disease.  Ringworm, you see a lot of time  on kids through grade school,  also, athlete's foot, you can  see a bit of.  This is an extreme case of  athlete's foot, hopefully none  of us have to deal with one that  bad.  But luckily we can treat these.  As well as, you can see, this  guy has some toe fungus, which,  if you've ever seen those  Lamisil commercials, evidently  this guy is toe fungus right  here, and he flips back your  toenail and dives on in,  according to the little cartoons  in the commercial, just starts  having a party, right?  So that, I guess, is toenail  fungus.  But luckily these are  topical-type infections that we  can treat fairly easily and  fairly effectively.  What gets a little more  difficult is systemic fungal  infections.  These are things like fungemia,  fungal pneumonia, fungal  meningitis. 

 And this is just one example of  fungal pneumonia, you can see,  this is an X-ray of somebody's  lungs.  So what you would want to see in  the lung cavity right here is a  nice black lung cavity, you  don't want to see anything in  there, it should just be clear.  But you can see all this white  fuzzy stuff, there it is, you  see all this white fuzzy stuff  going all through the lungs.  So this person, it's likely an  indication of a fungal  infection, or at least some  infection within the lungs.  And chances are this person  probably isn't doing very well.  I'll talk about that in a  second, but fungi overall are  emerging pathogens.  When you look at hospital  acquired infections, infections  that you get once you're in the  hospital, about 10% of them are  fungal infections.  And the more concerning figure  is what's right under that, is  that 50% of these infections are  actually fatal.  You have a 50% mortality rate  with these infections.  And you know, when you, at least  when I think of modern medicine,  that figure is kind of  astounding to me, it seems  really, really high, that it  could take out half of us, even  with all the technologies and  all the drugs and knowledge that  we have so far. 

 So why would it have such a high  mortality rate?  And it actually goes back to  what I mentioned in one of my  first couple slides, that when  they looked at the molecular,  the evolutionary position of the  fungi, it's actually closer to  animals and us than it is to a  lot of other things, like plants  and other parasites.  So here, what's in that blue  circle, you can see is  highlighted.  Right there.  We have yeast, which are the  fungi, again, we're getting into  these multiple names for fungi.  But it's right by humans.  So what happens is when we look  for drug targets, the bacteria  are way over here, so we can  find things that affect,  like at the molecular level,  at the proteins, because they're  so different evolutionarily  speaking, we can find things  that will kill the bacteria  quite easily.  And because we're so far apart  from them, they don't hurt the  humans.  But what happens, because of  this close evolutionary distance  between fungi and humans, is  there's limited therapeutic  options because really what you  run into are, a lot of them  actually target the fungal cell  wall, which is one of the few  differences between fungi and  humans.  But even those, they find the  most effective fungal therapies  actually also kill humans, or do  a damage to humans.  So it becomes a race. 

 You gotta hopefully kill the  fungus, before the drugs kill  you, or the fungus kills you.  That's a race nobody really  wants to be in.  It's not a good situation, so  why we study this stuff is, we  really want to see, and we think  a key to treating these fungal  diseases is understanding how  fungi grow and how they develop.  So we can find some of these  targets, some of these  differences because it's not  obvious, because we're so close  evolutionarily speaking, that we  need to find differences between  humans and fungi, between plants  and fungi, so that we can find  drugs and therapies that only  affect the fungi and don't also  affect us.  And so, I need a transition  here, sorry.  In thinking of fungal pathogens  for humans, one of the problems  we run into when we want to  study these is a lot of them  aren't very amenable, they  aren't very easy to work with in  the lab.  Some of them only grow on a  host, whether it be a plant,  whether it be an animal or  human, so you can't work with  them in the lab.  Some of them you can work with  in the lab, but we don't have  very good molecular tools to be  able to study and understand  what's going on with these  organisms.  An exception to this, at least  in my lab's humble opinion,  is cryptococcus neoformans  that we work on.  It's great, and this is a  picture of that beautiful beast  here. 

 So we see on the right here, is  a large mother cell.  And then budding off is a  daughter cell, so one of its  progeny.  And you can see all these  projections, are actually a  capsule, and this capsule is one  of the factors that help  cryptococcus evade the immune  system, and allow it to  potentially be an opportunistic  human fungal pathogen.  But what's unique about  cryptococcus as an opportunistic  fungal pathogen, is we really  have pretty good genetic tools  to work with.  We can culture it in the lab, so  we can actually do a lot of work  with this and learn a lot about  it.  And that's why it's one of the  ideal fungal pathogen models.  And when we look at this, just  to give you a little bit of  background on cryptococcus, when  I say it's an opportunistic  fungal pathogen, normally where  crypto is most often found, and  in fact, most fungi tend to be  opportunistic pathogens, what  that means is normally they're  living in the environment.  Cryptococcus has been associated  with eucalyptus trees initially,  it's been found on many other  trees since then.  If you think of trees, how they  have bark, it actually is most  often found in the hollows of  the trees, where you think there  might be some more detrius, more  dead material for it to probably  grow on, as well as on bird  guano.  But then again, it's not  necessarily associated with the  birds, the guano is just a good  nutrient source for it, what we  call a good substrate or medium  for it to grow on. 

 So here's some of the places  where it's found in the  environment.  And normally that's probably  where it's most often found, and  where it stays, its natural  habitat.  But what we believe happens is  that spores from these fungi are  released into the environment  and then we can inhale them into  our lungs, into a host's lungs,  whether they be human or animal.  And because spores are small in  size, they can be inhaled deep  within the lungs, because  normally, anything that goes  into your lungs, we inhale  millions and millions of spores,  fungal spores, bacterial spores,  every day and our body just  clears it no problem.  But when they get lodged deep it  can cause an infection, and  particularly if you're  immune-compromised in some  fashion.  And once that infection is  established, it can then  disseminate the crypto to the  central nervous system, where it  causes meningitis, which is  basically a swelling of your  brain, which is uniformly fatal  without treatment.  When I say it affects  immuno-compromised patients,  like I said, crypto again,  nothing here in the United  States we worry about too much,  it mainly affects populations  such as AIDS populations, if  you've had an organ transplant  and you're on  immuno-suppressants, you'd want  to be careful.  Some chemo therapies.  For whatever reason, if your  immune system is suppressed,  you'd have more worry about  this.  But again, we have good fungal  treatments here in the US, we  rarely have fatalities from  cryptococcus here in the United  States. 

 It's without treatment that it's  uniformly fatal.  So you can imagine, actually in  sub-Saharan Africa, where they  have a large AIDS population, as  well as a very difficult time  getting fungal treatment in  those areas, that this is a huge  problem and actually kills a lot  of people.  And so in my lab, we're actually  studying the sexual development  of cryptococcus, because it  leads to these spores, which  have been shown to be infectious  particles, and are believed to  be a likely route of infection,  that it would come through your  lungs.  Speed up a little bit here.  But this is a sexual development  process that we work on in the  lab.  So it starts off with two cells  of different mating types.  We call them "A" and "alpha,"  but you can think of them as  male and female.  So they see a mating partner of  opposite type, so you have mate  detection, and we do this on a  media that, it's literally V8  that we go buy at the grocery  store and we mix in with our  agar, which is a bit unusual,  but again, I think it comes down  to, it's plant material.  It's basically a lot of ground  up vegetables and everything,  and the fungi like it, they grow  on it, so it's cheap and we use  it, because a lot of things,  once you call it scientific, all  of a sudden the price goes up  ten times.  We just use straight V8 from the  supermarket, like any of you  guys would. 

 Probably not for growing crypto,  but you know.  If you wanted to.  But at this point, if we had the  mate detection, so the two  mating types have found each  other, get together, the cells  actually fuse, but the two  nuclei for each cell actually  stay independent and the nuclei  are where all the genetic  material of the organism is.  And at this point, it actually  undergoes a morphological  transition into a filamentous  stage, so it goes from growing  as those budding youths I showed  you in the first initial picture  of crypto, and now it's growing  as a filament.  When it grows as this filament,  it's called a "dikaryotic"  filament, and dikaryotic just  means two nuclei.  "Di" is two, and "karyon" is  nucleus, and so you have two  nucleus filamented, the  dikaryon.  So that's all that word means.  And it grows as this dikaryotic  filament until some other  signal, we haven't found out  yet, it forms this ball and club  structure called a basidium,  where the nuclei finally fuse,  genetic material can be  exchanged, and then they form  spores that are then released  into the environment.  And this is just kind of a  microscopic view of this  actually happening.  One picture is missing at the  end. 

 But you can see here, these are  spots of cells that the  individual haploid cells, just  one mating type, so that's no  sexual development, you don't  see any of these fuzzy  filaments.  But when the two get together,  you can see these filaments  coming off of that cell mass.  And then when we take the  microscopic look at it, you can  actually see the filaments  themselves, and there was a  third picture, I guess, a fifth  picture that actually showed the  basidia, that you can actually  take pictures of with the little  spore chains coming off of it.  But sorry, I think that one's  missing for tonight.  But besides spores, why should  your tax dollars fund me and my  colleagues studying the sexual  development of cryptococcus?  Well, as it turns out, who  would've thought, but sexual  development also makes people,  too.  So, what we see here, when we  look at sexual development in  humans, it's obviously a really  complex process, but because  it's so complex, that makes it  really difficult to study.  So what we have here is a fairly  simple organism, a fairly simple  system that we have the  molecular tools to look at,  those genetics I talked about,  that actually goes through a  morphological change from cell  type to cell type and then also  can form multi-cellular  structures.  So it's a unique way to possibly  get at some of the developmental  aspects, and again, because of  evolution, we can study it in  the simplest system and apply  what we learn to hopefully learn  things about higher organisms.  Such as ourselves and other  animals.  Another way to think of it,  this cell sexual development,  is more spore-related, but it's  actually that filaments  allow spore dispersal. 

 So you can think these guys are  stuck either in their bird guano  or whatever else, and they can't  get these spores out of there.  But when they can form these  aerial filaments, you can see  right here, it provides a little  bit, just enough distance to get  above this substrate, whatever  they're on, to release these  spores and provide better  dispersal.  And that's really what I kind of  look at in my project.  I want to look at this  dikaryotic filament stage and  see what helps it form, what  kind of makes it tick, and the  two reasons I just mentioned  that I think this is important  research is, one, it is a  developmental transition,  probably one of the simplest  developmental transitions.  And when I say simple, one that  we can control and look at that  actually has a morphological  change, it goes from one growth  state, when it's growing as  those round buds to a  filamentous state, so it's  actually a morphological change.  As well as its potential  importance for spore dispersal.  When I say I want to kind of  find out what makes it tick,  this is, I'm trying to decipher  what the molecular control of  this filamentous stage is, the  dikaryon.  And one way we do this is, I  want to find out what proteins  actually affect this within the  cell.  So if we can see, this is a  yeast.  This is a model organism  that we know a whole lot about. 

 So one way we look at this is we  look at these organisms we know  a lot about, and this is not to  scale, but you can see, the blue  dots are nuclei, and these  little odd shapes I made  represent proteins.  And so what we can do is look  into yeast where stuff is  well-defined and have done a lot  of work and, say, this one red  triangle that's right here, in  yeast they know it's important  for the cytoskeleton integrity  and nuclear movement.  So the cytoskeleton is the same  as our own skeleton, it provides  integrity for the cell, as well  as something to be able to move  on, like you muscles, to be able  to move on your skeletal  structure, so it's kind of the  same idea with the cell.  But if we know that's what it's  doing in this other organism  that's been well studied, I want  to go look for it in  cryptococcus, the organism I  work on, and find out, do we  have one of these?  And as well, what does it do?  Particularly in that dikaryotic  state that I'm most concerned  about.  And the protein I'm just gonna  talk a little bit about today is  Bim1, and it was named because  it binds microtubules.  And microtubules are just long  filaments within the cell that  form part of this cytoskeleton.  You can think of them as kind of  akin to bones, they're  structures within the cell that  provide integrity, like long  cables.  And so what we look at, this is  just a pictorial representation  of the two proteins, the yeast  one that we already knew about,  and then I did find a protein  in cryptococcus neoformans that  we compare what we call the  sequence, when we look at its  evolution.  So these represent functional  domains of the two proteins.  And you can see by the red and  the green boxes, the same  functional domains show up in  this cryptococcal protein that I  found. 

 So it's very likely it's doing a  similar thing.  That it's also involved in  cytoskeleton integrity and  nuclear migration.  But the yeast that was  originally identified doesn't  have this filamentous growth  stage, so I want to see how does  this protein that is probably  likely functioning in a similar  manner, how does it impact the  filaments themselves?  So one way we look at this, I  should've mentioned on this  other slide, when we look at  proteins, like we can actually  see the nuclei in a cell, we can  look on a microscope and see  those.  But proteins are much, much  smaller.  I think if I did the  calculations semi-right, trying  to look at a protein would be  like trying to look at an  individual blade of grass on a  football field from the stands  or something.  So it's something you can't  directly look at, you can't just  look and see what these guys are  doing.  So we have to find indirect  means to look at it.  So once this protein was  identified, this is where, since  we have the molecular tools in  this organism, we actually  removed this gene from the  organism, so it's kind of like  reverse engineering.  We take it out, we see what  happens.  And then likely, whatever caused  the phenotypes we see, something  that's different from the  normal, was probably caused by  the gene we removed. 

 So what I did was, I created  strains of cryptococcus that  didn't have this Bim1 protein,  the gene for it, so you have no  protein.  Then I wanted to see what  happened in sexual development.  So this is our assay, at least  this part of it is pretty  simple, it follows the sexual  development slide I talked about  earlier.  You mix the opposite mating  types, you put them on the V8  medium we like, you put them in  the dark for 48 hours, we debate  whether it really needs to be in  the dark, right, do you need  mood music or anything, stuff  like this.  But some people swear it works  better in the dark, so we stick  with it.  We put them in the dark for 48  hours, and then this is what we  see.  This would just be like a  cartoon representation of a  petri dish with haploid cells on  top and cells that were mated  together with opposite mating  types on the bottom.  And again, these are the  pictures you saw a little bit  earlier that, when you don't  have a mating partner, you don't  get any filaments.  But when you do you see robust  filamentation.  And so on the next slide, what  I'll be showing you is actually  the edge of these spots of  cells, magnified probably about  200 times  under the microscope. 

 So to orient you to what mating  is, successful or not, again,  these are the haploid cells,  so you can see here,  no filamentation.  And looking up at it under the  microscope, you can see there's  no filaments here, you just see  a smooth line of cells.  But when we look at a wild type  cross, so the wild type mating  partners, when they get  together, you see robust  filamentation, a lot of aerial  filaments growing out all over  the place.  But when I look at the deletion  cross, when I've taken this gene  out, the Bim1 gene is now gone,  we see filaments, but all of a  sudden this filaments can't grow  as high or as aerial as what's  seen in the wild type strains.  But even though these do go on  to complete sexual development,  they go through the basidia that  I mentioned that you form  spores, they can't form the long  filaments that we see in the  wild type.  So once I saw this, I wanted to  take a little closer look at  what's going on.  And these are actually  fluorescent images.  Hopefully you guys can see this,  because I don't know what to  touch to turn down the lights,  but if you can see the blue,  it's outlining the cell  structure, so that's the outline  of the cell, and in the green  are the nuclei within the cell.  So you can see again, in the  wild type crosses, you have  nice, elongated filaments that  look structurally intact, have  nice integrity, but when we look  over here at the deletion  crosses, again, the cell, it's  actually the cell wall that's  staying blue, so the outline of  the cell, all of a sudden these  filaments don't look right.  They're all floppy, they don't  have any integrity, so something  is definitely wrong with these  guys. 

 And based on what we saw in that  yeast, other organism, we think  it's likely to be microtubule  mediated, that these  microtubules within the  cytoskeleton are causing this  defect in the filament.  And one way to look at this  indirectly, is we take an  inhibitor of these microtubules,  and we want to see if these  strains that don't have this  gene, that don't have Bim1, are  they more sensitive to these  microtubule inhibitors?  So what we have here is just  cells in a single dilution, so  there's less cells in each spot  as you move down, and you can  see when you don't have any  inhibitor, everything grows just  fine.  But when you put in this  microtubule inhibitor, in these  strains that don't have Bim1,  all of a sudden you see a large  reduction in the growth.  So this is an indirect  indication that it can't handle  the microtubule stress.  Likely because the microtubules  aren't forming as they are in  wild type cells.  So with this data we have a  working model with this, and a  lot of data I didn't necessarily  get into today, but what we have  here is the filaments, those  dikaryotic filaments, with the  wild type.  If these are the microtubules as  we think of the cables, you get  nice long cables that form nice  elongated cells that have solid  integrity and can get off the  substrate to possibly release  their spores into the  environment.  And we can see that both in the  cartoon diagram as well as what  I showed in the fluorescent  microscopy.  However when we delete Bim1,  what we think is happening is  that these microtubules can't  grow as long and they aren't  directed properly.  So all of a sudden you have  filaments that can't form well,  and end up being floppy and  can't get off the substrate. 

 And so with that, that kind of  wraps up the talk, I just wanted  to hit a few last summary points  that hopefully I got across in  this talk today.  One, that fungi are essential  for life on earth.  And they're an integral part of  many food chains as well as many  industries.  And that while fungal disease  can be devastating for plants  and animals, it's really the  fungal models that we study,  help us to understand this  disease and hopefully will bring  us new therapeutics in the  future to be able to deal with  the fungi as they become an  increasing problem in these  hospital and other situations.  And as a final take home, I know  you guys are probably a  sympathetic audience, but I do  have to plug that it really is  the basic understanding of these  organisms that lead to the  scientific advances.  And often in ways that you never  expect.  And I can't emphasize enough how  much this is true and in fact,  if we have time afterwards, I  can probably get into another  example of our individual  organism, another therapeutic  that came out if, that a guy  wasn't looking for at all.  He was just looking at  cryptococcus trying to learn  what happens, and lo and behold,  the same way Fleming found  penicillin, it's just a Eureka  type moment.  So with that, I'd just like to  acknowledge my lab.  Dr Hull, she's right here, and  she's a great person to work  for. 

 In fact, if you ever get a  chance to talk to her, she knows  and loves fungi much more than  me, I like them, but she's crazy  about fungi.  And just in general a really  amazing person to talk to if you  ever get the chance.  And those are the rest of us in  the lab, the grad students,  undergrads, technicians.  So we all help each other out.  As well as the funding sources  that have helped me as well as  the lab to make a lot of this  research possible.  So that's all I have, if you  guys have some questions,  I'd love to hear them.  (applause)