E. Anne Hatmaker, Ph.D.

The final chapter of my dissertation was published this week in Nature Communications! I’m thrilled that this work is out in the world as more than a preprint (finally), after many years of collecting and analyzing data, writing, and revisions. The paper, titled “Population structure in a fungal human pathogen is potentially linked to pathogenicity,” takes a genomic approach to understanding strain variation within Aspergillus flavus. Until now, there haven’t been many clinical isolates of A. flavus with whole genome sequencing data, which I felt provided an opportunity for us to contribute and to better understand this pathogen and its evolution. We compared clinical and environmental isolates of A. flavus in the hopes of identifying genes or traits associated with pathogenicity. We used a variety of methods to explore the relationships among isolates, including population genomics, pangenomics, and phylogenetics. Since all infections of A. flavus are acquired from the environment and not person-to-person transmission, we did not expect to see that human-associated clinical isolates were segregated from environmental isolates. However, that’s exactly what we saw! Population D had a much higher number and proportion of clinical isolates than any other population. This is really exciting for the future study of the species and its ability to infect human.

Although I am now a postdoc working on fungal pathogens outside of Aspergillus, A. flavus remains my favorite species to study. The whole genome sequencing data is available publicly for other researchers to use, and I look forward to further exploring this genomic dataset of 300 isolates, along with additional sequencing data we’ve generated from more countries. Hopefully one day soon, continued studies of A. flavus will make up part of my research portfolio as an assistant professor. The Evolutionary Studies Initiative at Vanderbilt University also wrote a press release, which you can read here. My research on this project as a doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt University was funded through the National Institutes of Health National Eye Institute’s Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F31 EY033235).