Wednesday, September 20th at 7pm Pacific, join us at the HUUF (24 Fellowship Way, Bayside, CA) for show and tell and social time. At 7:30, we'll transition to club business and at 7:45 we'll introduce our George Verback scholarship recipient, Jay Yeam, for a talk about Suillus (and other EM) and our changing climate.

Ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi are plant-root symbionts that form obligate, mutualistic interactions with forest trees in seasonally cool and temperate climates. This mutualism involves plants sharing sugars with fungal symbionts in exchange for essential limiting nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. However, this plant-microbe partnership is highly context dependent, and the impact fungi have on their hosts may shift depending on their environment. As our climate continues to change, a major question is raised in the field regarding how EM fungi adapt to local climates. In this talk, I will share different approaches that the Peay lab at Stanford University uses to study the impact EM fungi have on their host, as well as how we can use genetic approaches to investigate how fungal populations structure and how these populations adapt to their local climates.

Speaker Bio

Jay was born and raised in Southern California, where he found his love for the outdoors from spending much of his childhood outdoors and frequenting backpacking trips in the Sierras. He studied Organismal Biology during his undergrad at Claremont McKenna College, where he spent his time exploring different biological systems and topics. He spent a summer working at a conservation center in Zimbabwe and also studied plant adaptation with Dr. Kailen Mooney at the University of California, Irvine. However, he didn’t discover his true passion in biology until he stumbled up the world of fungi. Amazed by their ubiquity and diversity, while also being drawn in by their mystique and weirdness, he now studies fungal symbiosis as a PhD student in Dr. Kabir Peay’s lab at Stanford University, where he investigates what symbiotic interactions do, how they form, and how they adapt to their environments.

This will be streamed on Zoom!