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. 2025 Jul 18;21(7):e1013303.
doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1013303. eCollection 2025 Jul.

Myco-Ed: Mycological curriculum for education and discovery

Sara Branco  1 , Peter G Avis  2 , Kerrie Barry  3 , Scott Bates  4 , Gerald M Cobián  5 , Ellen G Dow  6 , Sara Gremillion  7 , Amy Honan  8 , Chinyere A Knight  9 , Kurt LaButti  3 , C Alisha Quandt  10 , Jane E Stewart  11 , Jayson Talag  12 , Andrew W Wilson  13 , Lotus Lofgren  14 , Stephen James Mondo  3   6   11
Affiliations

Myco-Ed: Mycological curriculum for education and discovery

Sara Branco et al. PLoS Pathog. .

Abstract

Fungi are important and hyperdiverse organisms, yet chronically understudied. Most fungal clades have no reference genomes, impeding our understanding of their ecosystem functions and use as solutions in health and biotechnology. Also, opportunities for training in fungal biology and genomics are lacking, creating a bottleneck that hinders the recruitment and cultivation of a talented future mycological workforce. To address these issues, we developed Myco-Ed, an educational program offering training and scientific contributions through genome sequencing and analysis. Myco-Ed empowers students to pursue careers in fungal biology while improving fungal resources. Myco-Ed has been piloted at 12 institutions (15 classrooms) ranging from online e-Campuses to R1 universities, resulting in hundreds of fungal observations and many new high-quality reference genomes.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. The Myco-Ed program is divided into modules that cover fungal isolation and identification, metadata collection, sample preparation, phenotypic assays, and curating fungal genome annotations.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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