July 2025 AMS virtual seminar: Nicholas Chong, on blackleg fungus!

We invite you to attend our upcoming AMS virtual seminar. This month, we're excited to feature Nicholas Chong, a mycologist at the University of Melbourne. Nick was one of our 2023 AMS Research Grant awardees!

The role of transposons in the blackleg fungus, Leptosphaeria maculans

Nicholas Chong

The University of Melbourne

Thursday, 31 July 2025

12pm (AEST) / 2pm (NZST) 

Register here

Summary

A major challenge for agriculture is how pathogens adapt to disease prevention measures such as genetic resistance or fungicides. In the case of Leptosphaeria maculans, research has found that one way the fungus changes rapidly is because of repetitive sequences in its DNA. It was thought all this repetitive DNA was remnants of transposable elements mutated by genome defense mechanisms in the fungus. However, recently a number of these transposable elements were found to have moved in the genome, changing gene function and causing resistance to fungicides. This project characterises two of these transposable elements as the first examples of active transposons in the species.

Meet our speaker - Nicholas Chong!

Nick has been involved in the molecular biology aspects of Blackleg research since his Honours year, which led into a PhD project. In particular, he focused on the impact of repetitive DNA sequences on the unusual biology of Leptosphaeria maculans, the causal agent of Blackleg disease of canola. Nick worked to overturn the long dogma that this species has no active transposable elements, and what this may mean in the impacts to management and control of the disease. While majorly focusing on Leptosphaeria maculans, Nick also touched on some other fungi species in adjacent projects, such as Paecilomyces and Cryptococcus, during his PhD.