Lab updates November/December 2025

On November 3rd, I gave an invited talk at the 4th International Congress on Fungal Conservation, which took place in Benin. It was an online presentation in which I talked about the interplay between fungal conservation and citizen science. I made several references to our European-wide FunDive project and its citizen science campaigns focused on alien mushrooms, pine forest ectomycorrhizal fungi, Geastrum, and Hesperomyces, among others.

Libelje’s first PhD chapter was published in MycoKeys, “The first checklist of fungi known for Honduras: revealing taxonomic, geographical, and functional trends”: https://doi.org/10.3897/mycokeys.126.169230. We searched and curated records of fungi in Honduras from several sources, including MyCoPortal, Index Fungorum, the Kew Data Portal, and published literature. The final checklist includes 4011 curated records representing 1365 species. (Also really fun to explore these species in this interactive Krona plot.)

I offered the postdoctoral position as part of my Lumina Quaeruntur Fellowship to Dr. Danushka (Danu) Tennakoon. Danu comes highly recommended, with a PhD from Mae Fah Luang University (Thailand) and postdoctoral experience in Shenzhen University (China). His primary expertise is with plant-associated fungi but he shares an interest with the lab in cross-kingdom host interactions. Welcome to the lab, Danu!

In December, the second “C4inV4” workshop took place in Warsaw and Urwitałt, Poland. This workshop focused on phylogenomics. I gave an open lecture on how genome-scale phylogenetic analyses have challenged our traditional views on the placement of Laboulbeniomycetes. The third and last “C4inV4” workshop will take place in Szeged, Hungary, from 16 to 20 February 2026, hosted by the lab of László Nagy. Registration here. This project, Courses to improve Collaboration in V4 Countries to learn about Cryptic fungi, is funded by the Visegrad Fund (grant no. 22420237).

The lab is expanding!

End of October, I received the news that my application for a Junior Star grant from the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) was successful (project no. 26-23464M: A multiscale perspective on multitrophic interactions of bats, their parasites, and pathogens). These funds, a total of 23,559,000 CZK (935,252 €) over five year, allows me to hire a postdoc, three PhD students, and a full-time lab manager.