ISHAM NEWS! (15-3-2012)

Dear , ISHAM welcomes the new Turkish Society for Medical Mycology that was established in Izmir, Turkey, January 2012. Prof. Emel Tumbay (emeltumbay@yahoo.com) has been elected asPresident. Council members are Süleyha Hilmioğlu-Polat (Secretary), Ramazan İnci (Treasurer), Semra Kuştimur (Member), and Macit İlkit (Member).

Leila Lopes Bezerra and Hector Mora Montes and the conveners of the new ISHAM Working Group on Sporothrix. The group focuses on the cell wall and host-fungus interplay, and seeks the study of biosynthesis, structure, function and roles in virulence and immune sensing of S. schenckii cell wall glycoproteins. Thanks to the efforts of the Brazilian Genome Project consortium on S. schenckii and S. brasiliensis headed by Dr. Maria Sueli Felipe the genome sequence of these two Sporothrix species has been sequenced and will be available soon to the scientific community. A third genome of S. globosa was recently included in this project. This proposal associates researchers from Technological and Scientific Institutes (UnB, UERJ, LNCC and USP-SP) with different expertise’s that are complementary, which certainly will contribute to the development of this project. Therefore, we have expanded our goals to projects including genomic, proteomic, and phylogenetic aspects of this fungus. Our WG shall hold a special session during the ISHAM Congress Berlin, Germany (June 13th). We announce that the First International Meeting on Sporothrix will be held in Rio de Janeiro during 2013; more information and details for registration will be given later in the year.

With great sorrow we learnt that on 25 February 2012 Professor Hans Christian Korting, respected member and past President of the Germanspeaking Mycological Society, past away after a short illness. An obituary will be placed on the ISHAM website soon.

The Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology (Hans Knöll Institute) has a position available for a PhD student on the theme “Micronutrient acquisition during fungal infections”. Information can be found here, or contact Dr. Sascha Brunke.

For those interested in general mycology there is a nice video of the of the Fungarium at Kew Gardens, see here, and a film about black fungi (in German language) can be found here.

Please your attention for a questionnaire for ISHAM membership on misconduct in research and publishing, see here. Through this questionnaire some insight should be obtained into the extent of the problem of ethical misconduct among the ISHAM membership. The results will be presented and discussed during the Discussion Round on ‘Ethics in Scientific Publishing’ at the coming ISHAM congress in Berlin, 11-15 June, 2012. All data will be treated without any disclosure to a person. The survey is open until the end of April 2012. For questions, contact Teun Boekhout.


The 15th International Congress of Infectious Diseases will take place in Bangkok, Thailand, 13-16 June, 2012. Full information can be found here.

The ISHAM journal Medical Mycology has new instructions to authors, see here.

The Jena School for Microbial Communication (www.jsmc.uni-jena.de) has a PhD position available on the theme “Survival strategies of humanpathogenic zygomycetes inside macrophages”. Full information can be found here or from Kerstin Voigt.