FABI at the Fusarium workshop 2022-03-30
A number of FABI team members including Prof. Mike Wingfield, Prof. Brenda Wingfield and Dr Lieschen de Vos attended the 2022 Fusarium Workshop at the Asilomar Conference Centre a day prior to the 31st Fungal Genetics Conference (FGC). Research on Fusarium has featured strongly at the Asilomar FGC with four of 78 papers on the topic presented in 1978 and 94 of 905 at the 2022 conference. Informal Fusarium workshops started at the FGC in 2003 and these were formalized in 2011 making the current event the sixth, and of which Brenda Wingfield has attended all. The 2022 Fusarium Workshop, organised by Lu-Jun Ma, Corby Kistler, Martijn Rep and Antonio Di Pietro featured a large number of presentations covering contemporary topics including, biology, genetics and taxonomy. A highlight was a presentation by Corby Kistler marking his retirement after some 45 years of research on Fusarium. And an interesting perspective was that the Workshop was held at a site surrounded by hundreds of trees suffering from pitch canker caused by Fusarium circinatum.