IIGB associate professor Jason Stajich is the principal investigator of a four-year project involving 11 collaborating institutions that have been funded a total of $2.5 million by the National Science Foundation. The project focuses on studying zygomycetes – ancient lineages of fungi that include plant symbionts, animal and human pathogens and decomposers of a wide variety of organic compounds.

Zygomycetes, used in numerous industrial processes and fermentation of foods, are thought to be among the first terrestrial fungi. Symbiotic associations with zygomycetes may have facilitated the origin of land plants. Zygomycetes also represent one of the earliest origins of multicellular growth forms in fungi. Their filamentous growth is in the form of the tube-like cell growth that characterizes species of fungi like bread and fruit molds.

The project is called the Zygomycete Genealogy of Life (ZyGoLife). ZyGoLife aims to resolve the evolutionary relationships through integration of numerous types of data, including genome sequencing and analyses, discovery and description of zygomycete fossils, development of enhanced tools for detecting zygomycetes in the environment, and state-of-the-art bioimaging. In addition, the project will develop educational resources for schools and the general public to highlight the importance of this poorly known group of fungi including expansion of Encyclopedia of Life pages about these fungi.

Stajich explained that by resolving these earliest branches in the fungal genealogy scientists can study what the likely characteristics of ancestral fungi were, and determine what traits emerged first and were necessary as part of the transitions of life from aquatic to terrestrial ecosystems.

Besides UC Riverside, the following institutions are collaborating on ZyGoLife: Oregon State University, The University of Michigan, Arizona State University, University of British Columbia, University of Kansas, Boise State University, Duke University, University of Florida, University of Ottawa and Bacterial Foodborne Pathogens & Mycology Research Unit of the USDA-ARS in Peoria, Ill.

Stajich’s group will be performing genome sequencing to generate approximately 25 new genomes of zygomycetes focusing on three groups that include free-living and parasites of insects, plants, and other fungi. This project will generate at least 100 new zygomycete genomes to be analyzed by the team to determine the relationships between these fungi.

The Stajich lab will also host visiting students and postdocs from the other teams to provide training in bioinformatics and evolutionary genomics in fungi. In addition, members of his lab will travel to collaborators’ labs for training in microscopy, methods for dating fungal fossils, and training in zygomycete identification and taxonomy. The lab at IIGB will be spearheading genome sequence analysis to better establish the family tree of fungi from these lineages and disseminating data into genomic databases like MycoCosm of the Joint Genome Institute of the U.S. Department of Energy and FungiDB.

UCR will receive $715,000 of the $2.5 million funding for the project. This amount includes subawards UCR will make to collaborators at Duke University and Boise State University.