Guest Editors
Gustavo H. Goldman
University of São Paulo- Ribeirão Preto
Gustavo H. Goldman is a Professor in Molecular Biology at the Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. His work is focused on understanding the signal transduction pathways important for virulence in the human fungal pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus and also carbon catabolite repression in the model system A. nidulans. Gustavo got his PhD in the laboratory of Marc Van Montagu in Ghent, Belgium, working with the molecular mechanisms of biocontrol by Trichoderma harzianum. Then, he moved to Ron Morris’ lab in New Jersey, USA, to research the A. nidulans cytoskeleton. After this postdoctoral period, he was appointed as Assistant Professor at the Universidade de São Paulo, where has been for 26 years. Gustavo has extensive experience in fungal biology and he is currently Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Fungal Biology, and an Associate Editor for mBio, Fungal Genetics and Biology, and Fungal Biology.
Neil Brown
University of Bath
Neil Brown is an Assistant Professor in Molecular Fungal Biology and Pathology at the University of Bath, UK. He is focused on discovering new ways to fight major fungal diseases that threaten our food security and health. Neil began his career at Rothamsted Research on a successful BBSRC-Syngenta CASE PhD studentship studying fungal pathology. Neil used these experiences to win a FAPESP Fellowship and subsequently the CNPq Science without borders Young Talent Fellowship at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, where he answered fundamental questions of how fungi sense their environment. Neil returned to Rothamsted Research, where he combined his interests in environment sensing and pathology in a BBSRC Future Leaders Fellowship. During this time, Neil was appointed at the University of Bath, where he continues to investigate how fungi sense their environment to coordinate their biology and cause disease. The goal of this research is to determine whether fungal senses of ‘taste’ are targets to prevent them from causing disease.
Collection Overview
Aspergillus is a significant genus of fungi with ~200 species that cause human diseases, contaminate our food with harmful toxins, and are used in biotechnology. Examples include; Aspergillus fumigatus which presents a major threat to human health, A. flavus which contaminates crops with aflatoxin causing economic losses and food safety issues, while A. oryzae and A. niger are used to produce industrial enzymes and organic acids. Advances in technology and knowledge now facilitate the study of fungal evolution, the molecular determinants of disease, fungal cell biology and gene regulation, as well as the use of synthetic biology to develop new biotechnological products.
This JoVE methods collection aims to deliver centralized access to up-to-date methodologies, representing those currently used to interrogate Aspergillus biology and disease. These will be published as peer-reviewed articles, with the advantage of having professionally made videos of the methods performed in the expert’s laboratories. This will include aspects of Aspergillus functional genomics, virulence models, mycotoxin evaluation, immunology, clinical studies, and biotechnology. In the current global health crisis, there has been a vast increase in the demand for new resources for remote learning in higher education and scientific research. Therefore, this JoVE methods collection will benefit the whole Aspergillus research community by providing an inclusive approach to deliver remote learning and enhance the replication of modern methodologies throughout our laboratories.
Articles
Abstracts
Quantitative analysis of Aspergillus fumigatus conidia distribution in whole-mount optically cleared mouse lung
Ilia Zykov 1,
Ivan Maslov 1,
Marina Shevchenko*2,
Andrey Bogorodskiy1,
Natalia Troyanova 2,
Mariia Pavelchenko 3,
Valentin Borshchevskiy *4
1Research Center for Molecular Mechanisms of Aging and Age-Related Diseases, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Dolgoprudny, Russia,
2Laboratory of Cell Interactions, Department of Immunology, Shemyakin and Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia,
3Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Dolgoprudny, Russia,
4Institute of Biological Information Processing (IBI-7: Structural Biochemistry), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany