Dissertation Literature Mastery Seminar – Tristan Yang, PhD Student – “Computational Reconstruction of a Signature of Pathogenic Fungi”

Please join us for our PhD Student Tristan Yang’s dissertation literature mastery seminar on “Computational Reconstruction of a Signature of Pathogenic Fungi”

Global warming, due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide, makes it urgent to find improved agricultural strategies to trap atmospheric carbon dioxide into recalcitrant carbon compounds in the soil. We are addressing this problem by a genomic level analysis of soil fungi that play a major role in trapping carbon compounds. However, an important goal of this endeavor is to reliably distinguish between pathogenic fungi and those that are harmless for crops. Fungi are one of the most frequent plant pathogens, with over 8,000 known pathogenic species. It is crucial to understand the genes that define a certain fungus as a pathogen. The purpose of this project is to use machine learning algorithms to understand fungal genes that contribute to its pathogenicity towards a plant. I hypothesize that complex gene sets being present or absent would constitute a general genomic requirement for fungi to be a pathogen, which had evolved independently in many different ecological niches and many different host plants. The immediate goal is to explore whether a genomic signature of pathogenesis can be identified within the fungal genomes.

Date:  November 17, 2021

Time:  1:00 – 2:00 p.m.

Location: Building 517, Room 165 (Founder’s Room) and Via Zoom (Zoom link will be on Outlook Invite)