Emile Gluck-Thaler
Position title: Assistant Professor
Email: gluckthaler@wisc.edu
Address:
Plant Pathology
How fungi cause disease on animals and plants by integrating molecular genetics with evolutionary genomics and data science
- Lab Website
- https://plantpath.wisc.edu/faculty/emile-gluck-thaler/

Research Description:
Fungi have been rapidly evolving new strategies to infect plants and animals for over 500 million years. Because fungal infections threaten food security and public health, understanding how fungi cause disease is an environmental and economic priority. Our research addresses this priority by asking two questions: when do “good” fungi turn “bad” and how do fungi acquire new strategies for causing disease? We answer these questions by looking not only at how fungi interact with their hosts, but also how fungi interact with their genetic parasites (i.e. transposons) that have hidden but important impacts on adaptation. Most significantly, our multi-disciplinary approach led us to discover a new superfamily of giant transposons that we have named Starships. A major focus of the lab is to now understand the mechanisms and roles of Starships in fungal pathogenesis and evolution.
Representative Publications:
Gluck-Thaler, Emile, et al. “Giant starship elements mobilize accessory genes in fungal genomes.” Molecular biology and evolution 39.5 (2022): msac109.
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. Urquhart, Andrew, Aaron A. Vogan, and
Emile Gluck-Thaler. “Starships: a new frontier for fungal biology.” Trends in Genetics (2024).