YEASTS: THE ENORMOUS DIVERSITY OF SINGLE-CELLED FUNGI

The Talk: Most fungi are completely invisible to humans. While we love to admire beautiful mushrooms and other large fruiting bodies in the forest, entire communities of cryptic and microscopic fungi are living and growing under our feet. Single-celled fungi, also known as yeasts, are among these cryptic fungi. Because they are single-celled, we can't see them with our own eyes, and yet they exist in almost all environments on Earth. The single-celled growth form evolved several times from hyphal ancestors and is common worldwide, but yeasts' roles in ecosystems are often mysterious.

In this talk, I will introduce you to the wonderful world of naturally-occurring yeasts; giving some historic context on how humans have been interacting with yeasts for thousands of years, before discussing what we do and don't know about yeast ecology in nature. Then I'll discuss my own work with yeasts: I work with yeasts in several natural New England habitats, including temperate forests and carnivorous plants. I am working to expand our knowledge of yeast ecology and evolution by focusing on how yeasts interact with other living things in nature. With this talk, I hope to give audience members a new appreciation for the mysterious and intriguing invisible fungal diversity they encounter every day.

The Speaker: Primrose Boynton is an assistant professor in Biology at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, USA. She received her PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University in 2012, where she studied the diversity and ecology of yeasts in carnivorous pitcher plants. She went on to work at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, on the ecology and evolution of Saccharomyces species in their natural environments. She is broadly interested in what determines microbial fitness in natural environments, and uses the diversity of yeasts, with a focus on model organisms in nature, to understand yeast and microbial ecology and evolution.