Image: Congratulations to Benjamin Chadwick, Ph.D. candidate in the Lin Lab, for winning the department’s Graduate student Paper-of-the Year award for 2022. Benjamin’s paper “The RAM signaling pathway links morphology, thermotolerance, and CO2 tolerance in the global fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans” identified two genes related to CO2 tolerance in the fungus C. neoformans. C. neoformans kills over 180,000 people every year. It targets the lungs and the central nervous system affecting primarily people with weakened immune systems. The fungus can withstand high CO2 environments in the human body (5-10%) and has a high heat tolerance, which allows it to thrive in its human host. Chadwick et al. (2022) investigated the RAM pathway of the fungus which is activated by heat stress. They compared genomic sequences of fungus strains with high CO2 tolerance to those with low CO2 tolerance and found two mutations in the low CO2 strains. They verified their results by deleting the genes with these mutations, which restored the CO2 tolerance in these strains. This research provides significant insights on how the fungus survives in the human host. As noted by the editors: “These results should be of interest to a broad community in the life sciences including microbiologists and infectious diseases investigators”. Read the full paper here. An honorable mention for the 2022 Graduate Student Paper-of-the Year Award went to Ashley Earley and her paper “Genomic regions associate with major axes of variation driven by gas exchange and leaf construction traits in cultivated sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.).” Earley et al. (2022) studied leaf traits in cultivated sunflowers (Helianthus annuus L.) that are thought to play a key role in the adaptation of plants to drought. They were specifically interested in leaf anatomical traits like stomata and leaf veins which play an essential role in water loss and movement of water though leaves. The authors used patterns of variation and covariation in these leaf anatomical traits and analyzed their genetic architecture via genome-wide association (GWA) analyses, and identified specific genetic regions associated with stoma size and the density of leaf venation. This information can potentially be used to target specific leaf anatomical characteristics through breeding, producing sunflowers with increased drought resistance. Read the full article here.
