The Kingdom Fungi: Diversity, Society and Models for Evolution

John Taylor has been a faculty member at Berkeley since 1980. He and his students, postdocs and visiting scientists are best known for research on molecular evolution of fungi. One of their publications on the topic has been cited more than 12,500 times. Prof. Taylor and his group have used DNA sequence to study ancient relationships among the main groups of fungi and how DNA variation can be used to estimate the dates of these ancient events. With DNA sequence, they developed means of recognizing species of fungi and inferring fungal bio-geographical history. Whole genome sequencing has let them find new sources of genetic variation in fungi, and whole genome sequencing of populations of fungi has let them study the process that builds the Tree of Life, that is, the splitting of populations and their adaptation at the level of single genes.

Speaker: John Taylor, UC Berkeley