Anne Pringle
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Anne Pringle was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and she spent her childhood traveling through Southeast Asia and West Africa. After being dragged along on one-too-many birding expeditions, she abandoned the birds for fungi. She was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and then completed a Ph.D. in Botany and Genetics at Duke University. After completing a Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the faculty at Harvard University. She next moved to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she is now a Vilas Distinguished Achievement and the Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor in the Departments of Botany and Bacteriology. Pringle has given over 180 talks to academic and popular audiences in countries including China, Colombia, France, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. She has been awarded the Alexopoulos Prize for a Distinguished Early Career Mycologist (2010), the Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Harvard University Graduate Student Council (2011), the Fannie Cox Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching from Harvard University (2013), a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship (2011-2012), the Mid-Career Mycorrhiza Research Excellence Award from the International Mycorrhiza Society (2019), and a Fulbright U.S. Scholarship (2022-2023, taken to South Africa). She is a National Geographic Explorer. Her research has been featured by the New York Times, National Public Radio, Modern Farmer, and the Wisconsin State Journal, among others. In 2019, Pringle was elected President of the Mycological Society of America.
To see Pringle talk about fungi, invasion by death caps, and the microbiomes of pitcher plants, please visit the ibiology website. To read her publications and see her lab’s video about working with fungi please visit her laboratory website.
Abstract:
Fungi Also Invade: The Evolution of Californian Death Caps and Impacts of Golden Oysters
The poisonous European Amanita phalloides (the death cap) is an ectomycorrhizal fungus introduced to North America. First, using genomes as a tool, we sought to understand how death caps reproduce and whether selfing is a strategy used to sporulate and move across landscapes. Canonical sexual reproduction among basidiomycete fungi involves the fusion of two haploid individuals of different mating types, resulting in a heterokaryotic mycelial body made up of genetically different nuclei. But we discovered single individuals can also reproduce and ultimately, we found evidence for the independent behavior of what seem to be selfish nuclei. Death cap sporulation is enabled by these nuclei, which can reproduce alone as well as with others and have persisted in invaded habitats for at least 17 but potentially as long as 30 years. Second, a decades-long criticism of research on invasive fungi targets the definition of the word invasive; do death caps or other invasive fungi cause damage, do they “matter”? To answer this question we turned to a system we can manipulate: Golden Oysters. Pleurotus citrinopileatus is an edible wood decay fungus rapidly spreading through North America; it escaped from grow kits into forests. By documenting the fungal biodiversity of trees both with and without the fungus we show the dramatic impact Golden Oysters are having on local fungi; trees with the fungus house few other species.