Jason Slot visits us from Columbus to talk about “The magic of horizontal gene transfer in fungi”. We will be at a new venue — Urban Artifact!
Fungi are a major source of chemical compounds that have had far-reaching impacts on human health and society. Dr Jason Slot will discuss how fungi acquire the ability to make new bioactive chemicals through horizontal gene transfer, and will highlight the origins of hallucinogenic mushrooms. This work is made possible by modeling the evolution and ecology of metabolic genes, as distinct from the species that contain them, across hundreds of fungal genomes.
Jason Slot is an Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology at the Ohio State University. His research focuses on the evolution of mechanisms for fungal interactions with plants and animals. Jason began his career as a science educator, first at Boston’s Museum of Science, and then as a high school science teacher in Framingham, Massachusetts. He then obtained a doctorate at Clark University studying the evolution of fungal nutrition, followed by postdoctoral work in comparative genomics at Vanderbilt University. Currently his lab is investigating the role chemicals in coffee plants play in selecting their fungal microbiome.
