So far, Ariane has only been detected in strains isolated from grapevine. Arsenic was widely used in vineyards throughout the 20th century to control grapevine trunk diseases and insect pests. Ariane may therefore have played an important role in the adaptation of B. cinerea to vineyards.
This Starship is 93 kb long and carries 2 captains and 43 cargo genes. Because it confers ARsenic resistance, we named it ARiane (as the European space rocket 🚀 ).
🔔 Our synthesis on what’s going on in the field of TE control and RIP in the fungal world!
Out now in Trends in Genetics!
Peer-reviewed version of our study led by @aliceeseola.bsky.social first seen on @biorxiv-cellbio.bsky.social showing the exquisite level of control of organelle trafficking & autophagy exerted during plant infection by the blast fungus. Thanks to all co-authors.
www.cell.com/cell-reports...
Announcing our new free Webinar series sponsored by GetGenome: Road to Jeju. The series will feature 7 webinars with Legends and Rising Stars of IS-MPMI. Sign up to attend the first talk by Roger Innes on June 17. lnkd.in/gw4pKp4K Rising Star info coming soon. please repost!
Interested in how #fungi came about on this planet? If so, take a look at my new article that just came out in @annualreviews.bsky.social.
doi.org/10.1146/annu...
We dive into the dynamics of #starships 🚀 in a fungal pathogen to ask: how might these giant #transposons impact human health? We find they drive genome-wide variation, encode clinically-relevant traits and even transpose within the same strain! 🍄🧪 out today in mBio #goteam doi.org/10.1128/mbio...
Fun fact: In the Greek mythology, Ariadne marries Dionysus, the god of wine 🍷 Thanks to co-authors @inrae-bioger.bsky.social @umragroecologie.bsky.social and to the ANR project VITAE🍇 Any feedback on these data is welcome!
Happy to share our work! 🍄🍇 Botrytis cinerea grapevine-specialized strains harbor a specific repertoire of transposons. While retrotransposon-derived small RNAs do not appear to play a significant role in virulence on grapevine, a new giant transposon—a #Starship— confers arsenic resistance.
A funded PhD position for studying wheat pathogen adaptation to climate factors is open in my lab
@inrae-bioger.bsky.social @univparissaclay.bsky.social
in collab. @jki-research.bsky.social (Germany), with a start planned for autumn 2026 ▶️ eng-bioger.versailles-saclay.hub.inrae.fr/teams-and-pl...
The blast fungus forms a force-generating appressorium for plant infection. Eseola
et al. show how individual spore cells adopt distinct fates, trafficking organelles
to the appressorium or undergoing...
www.cell.com
Fungi are widespread on our planet and essential for life as we know it, but how did they come about? Their last common ancestor lived hundreds of millions of years ago, but its characteristics, and t...
No “one size fits all” option exists for treating fungal infections in large part
due to genetic and phenotypic variability among strains. Accounting for strain heterogeneity
is thus fundamental for d...
International Society for Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions
Emile Gluck-Thaler
Nick Talbot
Nearly a year after our symposium on Repeat-Induced Point (RIP) mutations, I’m happy to share the fruit of some of our discussions.
The fungal RIP hypermutator mechanism has deep eukaryotic roots www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
We hope to spark interest in this underappreciated mechanism.
Frédéric Suffert
Role of transposons in the specialization of Botrytis cinerea to grapevine: Insights into small RNAs and a new Starship https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.30.728154v1
