The kingdom of Fungi includes a biologically diverse group of organisms adapted to diverse environmental niches, playing important roles in ecosystems and human/animal/plant health. Fusarium , Magnaporthe , Ustilago , Puccinia , and Zymoseptoria species threaten agricultural ecosystems and food security worldwide, while Aspergillus , Candida , Coccidioides , Cryptococcus , Histoplasma , Pneumocystis , Batrachochytrium and other human and animal fungal pathogens cause allergies, serious illnesses, and sometimes life-threatening infections that are of great concern for veterinary and medical professionals around the world.

Furthermore, fungi are also important model systems for basic and applied research and workhorses in biotechnology, food, pharmaceutical, and biofuel industries.

Advancements in high throughput ‘omics’ data generation technologies enable researchers to carry out large-scale analyses to investigate genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, and metabolomes of numerous fungal organisms to address questions about pathogenicity, host-pathogen interactions, and identify new drug targets. To facilitate accessibility and analysis, a number of online fungal bioinformatic resources have been developed.

This week-long course is a collaborative teaching effort between the following web-based fungal data mining resources:

● FungiDB/VEuPathDB
● EnsemblFungi
● SGD/CGD
● MycoCosm/JGI

The Fungal Pathogen Genomics course provides hands-on training on how to take advantage of unique tools offered by each database; develop testable hypotheses, and investigate transcriptomics, proteomics and genomics datasets across multiple databases and different user interfaces.

Daily activities will include individual and group training exercises, supplementary lectures on bioinformatics techniques and tools used by various databases, and presentations by distinguished guest speakers.

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