News – Fritz-Laylin Lab

NSF CAREER Funded!

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posted February 10, 2022

We are very pleased that our NSF CAREER award on the developmental response of frog-killing chytrid fungi to amphibian mucus has been funded! We are so excited for the discoveries that will be made possible by this support. You can find out more about...

NIH R35 MIRA funded

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posted August 22, 2021

We look forward to five years of support for work related to the evolution and specification of the actin cytoskeleton. Thank you NIGMS for this flexible funding! For more information, see the relevant entry in the NIH REPORTER.

Postdoc Dr. Edgar Medina awarded HHMI Hanna Gray fellowship

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posted February 20, 2021

Dr. Edgar Medina has been awarded a Hanna Gray fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to support his postdoctoral work as well as his future independent research. You can read more about Edgar’s fellowship in this article from the UMass press office, and...

Research on actin networks of the “frog-killing fungus” Bd is published in Current Biology.

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posted February 8, 2021

Sarah Prostak, Kristyn Robinson, along with Margart Titus from the University of Minnesota have published their work “The actin networks of chytrid fungi reveal evolutionary loss of cytoskeletal complexity in the fungal kingdom” in Current Biology (you can read the paper here!). First author...

Postdoc Andrew Kennard joins the lab!

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posted February 1, 2021

The lab is thrilled to welcome Andrew Kennard, Ph.D as our newest postdoc! Andrew earned his Masters of philosophy in Physics at the University of Cambridge and received his Ph.D in Biophysics from Stanford University from the lab of Dr. Julie Theriot where he...

Research on Naegleria’s actin-based, microtubule-independent motility published in the Journal of Cell Biology.

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posted September 22, 2020

Dr. Katrina Velle has published her fascinating work on Naegleria gruberi’s crawling motility in a paper “Conserved actin machinery drives microtubule-independent motility and phagocytosis in Naegleria” in the Journal of Cell Biology. Lacking interphase microtubules as an amoeba, N. gruberi, related to the “brain-eating...

Guide to growing Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans published in Diseases of Aquatic Organisms

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posted June 22, 2020

“Isolation and maintenance of Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans cultures” is now published in Diseases of Aquatic Organisms. Here’s the abstract: Discovered in 2013, the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal) is an emerging amphibian pathogen that causes ulcerative skin lesions and multifocal erosion. A closely related pathogen, B. dendrobatidis (Bd), has devastated amphibian...

Essay on the evolution of animal cell motility published in Current Biology

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posted May 19, 2020

“The evolution of animal cell motility” is now published in Current Biology. Here’s the abstract: Eukaryotic cells use a number of diverse mechanisms to swim through liquid or crawl across solid surfaces. The two most prevalent forms of eukaryotic cell motility are flagellar-dependent swimming...

Genetic transformation of chytrid fungus published in eLife

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posted May 12, 2020

“Genetic transformation of Spizellomyces punctatus, a resource for studying chytrid biology and evolutionary cell biology” is now published in eLife. Here’s the abstract: Chytrids are early-diverging fungi that share features with animals that have been lost in most other fungi. They hold promise as a...

Communicate cell variability with SuperPlots

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posted April 30, 2020

“SuperPlots: Communicating reproducibility and variability in cell biology” is now published in the Journal of Cell Biology. Here’s the abstract: P values and error bars help readers infer whether a reported difference would likely recur, with the sample size n used for statistical tests representing biological...

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