Program & Schedule: 2024 MSA Annual Meeting

Professor Keller is the Robert L. Metzenberg and Kenneth B. Raper Professor of Mycology in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology and the Department of Plant Pathology at University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, USA. Her interest in fungal secondary metabolism dates back to her days as a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho, Africa where she gained first-hand knowledge of molded and toxic food supplies. Her current interests focus on the role of secondary metabolites in steering fungal interactions in their ecological niches and genome mining for fungal natural products. She received her PhD from the Department of Plant Pathology at Cornell University in 1990 and was then employed as a post-doctoral research scientist with the USDA followed by employment as an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Plant Pathology Department at Texas A&M University before moving to the UW Madison. She is a Fellow of AAAS, the American Phytopathological Society, and the American Academy of Microbiology and recipient of the SIMB Charles Thom Award for outstanding scientific contributions to the field of industrial microbiology and biotechnology.

Secondary metabolites: armaments, shields and enigmatic languages of fungi
To the general public, fungal secondary metabolites (SMs) – if considered at all – are known due to accidental or purposeful ingestion (toxins and hallucinogens) or treatment of various infectious diseases (antibiotics). For practitioners in the science, we now understand that SMs are critical molecules steering the ecology and interactions of large numbers of fungi, particularly in specific Ascomycete and Basidiomycete taxa. Springing from the unexpected finding that fungal genomes contain an astonishing wealth of diverse SM blueprints called biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs), technical advances in molecular genetic, computational and chemical analyses now allow laboratories worldwide to access BGCs and their products. Here I present a panoramic timeline touching on advances in BGC discovery, on SM mediated fungal/bacterial interactions and our optimism of solving a fungal SM mystery affecting Canadian agriculture.