PB Graduate students Kathryn Vescio and Kelly Allen and their faculty sponsor Rob Wick have co-founded a new GSO club on campus focused on exploring and sharing information on the fungi growing in our area.  The new club, S.M.U.T.S. (Society of Mycology at UMass for Teachers and Students), has been joined by Sam Glaze-Corcoran, Caroline Wise, Greg DeIulio, and Elisha Allan-Perkins, as well as UMass alumni, and is welcoming new members!  If you are interested in helping to plan or joining in on mushrooms forays, fungal trivia nights, fungal inspired crafts (like spore prints), or just learning more about the fascinating world of fungi, please feel free to come to our next general body meeting on Tuesday, December 1st at 5 pm in the Paige Laboratory Conference Room, or contact Greg (gdeiulio@cns.umass.edu) to be added to our mailing list.

We have a few mycology inspired events coming up this fall that are open to everyone! On November 17^th from 4:30-6, Dianna Smith of the Pioneer Valley Mycology Association will be giving a seminar on “100+ Edible Fungi and Their Poisonous Lookalikes (The Astute Amateur Mycologist Doesn't Play Russian Roulette)” in the Paige Conference room 202. On December 8^th we will be giving a mini-microscopy lesson and looking at microscopic fungi in Fernald Hall. We hope to see you there!

Researchers in Peter Chien's lab in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst report finding how an essential bacterial protease controls cell growth and division. Details appear in the journal CELL. Lead author Kamal Joshi, a doctoral candidate in the Chien lab, conducted experiments in the model bacterium Caulobacter crescentus. In this species, the ability to grow and replicate DNA is regulated by ClpXP, a highly conserved protease that in many bacteria allows them to cope with stressful environments such as the human body. Understanding how ClpXP is controlled could open a path to antibiotics that inhibit harmful bacteria in new ways. Read more

OEB Ph.D. candidate Anne Stengle, is overseeing a federal grant in nine states that studies a mysterious fungus killing snakes in the Northeast. In less than a decade, the fungus has been identified in at least nine Eastern states, and although it affects a number of species, it's especially threatening to rattlesnakes that live in small, isolated populations with little genetic diversity, such as those found in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York. According to Stengle, the fungus has been found in all five rattlesnake populations in Massachusetts, but it doesn't appear to have had the high mortality rate reported elsewhere. Stengle's dissertation research is on habitat selection, connectivity and viability of the timber rattlesnake metapopulation in southwestern Massachusetts.

Evan Palmer-Young, OEB doctoral candidate in Lynn Adler's lab, has been awarded a $20,735 Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from NSF's DEB for his project "Inter-strain variation and evolution of resistance to phytochemicals in the bumblebee trypanosome parasite, Crithidia bombi." Congratulations to Evan and Lynn!