Emile Gluck-Thaler
Position title: Assistant Professor
Email: gluckthaler@wisc.edu
Address:
Plant Pathology
- Lab Website
- https://fungi.cals.wisc.edu/
- Research interests
- Investigating how fungi cause disease on animals and plants by integrating molecular genetics, evolutionary genomics and data science
- Education
- PhD Plant Pathology, The Ohio State University Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland
Research Description:
Fungi have been evolving strategies to interact with plants, animals and other microbes for over 500 million years. Because many fungal interactions threaten food security and public health, understanding the mechanisms driving fungal interactions with other organisms is an economic and societal priority. Our research addresses this priority by asking two questions: how do fungi acquire new strategies for interacting with other organisms and when do “good” interactions turn “bad”? These questions are especially pertinent for fungal pathogens given the critical roles fungi play in plant and human microbiomes and the increasing prevalence of fungal diseases globally. Visit the Fungal Interactions Lab website to learn more about our work: fungi.cals.wisc.edu
Representative Publications:
Gluck-Thaler, Emile, et al. “Giant transposons promote strain heterogeneity in a major fungal pathogen.” mBio 16.6 (2025): e01092-25.
Urquhart, Andrew, Aaron A. Vogan, and Emile Gluck-Thaler. “Starships: a new frontier for fungal biology.” Trends in Genetics (2024).
Gluck-Thaler, Emile, and Aaron A. Vogan. “Systematic identification of cargo-mobilizing genetic elements reveals new dimensions of eukaryotic diversity.” Nucleic Acids Research 52.10 (2024): 5496-5513
Gluck-Thaler, Emile, et al. “Giant starship elements mobilize accessory genes in fungal genomes.” Molecular biology and evolution 39.5 (2022): msac109.