Mushrooms and Climate Change: Fungi in a Changing World

Dr. Rytas Vilgalys' talk will be about our studies at Duke University in North Carolina on environmental mycology using molecular approaches. At his lab, research is focusing on sampling DNA directly from the environment using state-of-the-art technologies such as high-throughput sequencing, microarrays, and bioinformatics to study how microbial communities respond to environmental change. He promises to show lots of cool mushroom pictures as well, although the talk will also try to introduce some ideas in fungal ecology.