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Grant Nickles

@grantnickles.bsky.social
202 followers 203 following 42 posts

Cyclist, mycologist, music, and hockey 🏳️‍🌈 gnick18.github.io UW-Madison RISE Postdoctoral Fellow in Fungal Interactions Lab

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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Northern MN is so special
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
too many months cooped up in the lab separates myself from why I went into biology in the first place. Nature and biodiversity is so incredible and there’s nothing like camping to ground myself in why I chose to be a biologist
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
😂😂😂
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Annie Hatmaker, Ph.D. @annemakerofhats.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
If you weren't at the Cellular and Molecular Fungal Biology Gordon Research Conference, I hope this helps you decide to go next time. It's such a great community! starring @grantnickles.bsky.social cinematography by @emmascales.bsky.social
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Duke University School of Medicine @dukemedschool.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Anna Lehmann, PhD candidate working in the Heitman Lab, found Aspergillus fumigatus can briefly duplicate chromosomes to survive antifungal treatment, then revert without a trace. medschool.duke.edu/news/phd-candida…
medschool.duke.edu
PhD candidate discovers a hidden way that a fungal pathogen may resist treatment
Some fungal pathogens survive antifungal drugs by mutating.
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garimasingh-gs.bsky.social @garimasingh-gs.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
🍄 New study on #fungal #isocyanide synthases (#ICSs)! With @grantnickles.bsky.social @kellerlab.bsky.social (Uni. Wisconsin-Madison) @currentbiology.bsky.social @unipd.bsky.social Thanks all for the great teamwork! doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.… #Lichens #SecondaryMetabolism #biosyntheticGenes #fungi
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New Phytologist @newphyt.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
What is the origin of South Africa's invading #mushrooms? The 'fly agaric' is the famous red-and-white-spotted mushroom of fairy tales. But like all good stories, this fairy tale has a dark twist: the mushroom is invasive on multiple continents, including in Africa. youtu.be/ILLT154Byw0 🧵1/3
youtu.be
What is the origin of South Africa's invading mushrooms?
The 'fly agaric' is the famous red-and-white-spotted mushroom of fairy tales. But like all good stories, this fairy tale has a dark twist: the mushroom is invasive on multiple continents, including…
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The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt University @rokaslab.bsky.social · 22/03/2026
What an honor and privilege to organize #fungal26 with the one and only Meritxell Riquelme! Thank you fungal community and @genetics-gsa.bsky.social for making this such a great meeting !
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LaBella Lab @lablabella.bsky.social · 22/03/2026
What a way to end #fungal26 We laughed and we cried and we learned so much A great reminder to look back and reflect on the past It can light the way to the future Thank you Nancy Keller for being a light 🕯️ in the field
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
Huge thanks to my South African and American co-authors! This project was born from a National Science Foundation (NSF) workshop in late 2022, leading to lifelong connections between many of us in the US and the amazing team at FABI at the University of Pretoria. 5/5
The research team behind this paper! Image taken at the amazing Kruger national park in South Africa.
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
Testing these metabolites for bioactivity showed they effectively kill nematodes, while microbes and flies appear unaffected. This extreme conservation aligns closely with frameworks like the Novel Weapons Hypothesis developed in plant and insect invasion ecology. 4/5
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
We identified Europe as the origin of the South African populations. Surprisingly, despite its long history in a novel environment, the fungus has not lost any biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). Mass spec showed a highly conserved profile. Only 13 of 273 molecular families were unique to SA. 3/5
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
While invasive plants get a lot of attention, invasive mushrooms are often overlooked. To reconstruct the history of A. muscaria in South Africa, we sequenced 24 genomes from both hemispheres (prior to our study, only a single genome from the USA had been sequenced). 2/5
Figure from the publication showing documented records of A. muscaria in 1950 vs 2022. Overall the number of sightings has sharply increased in recent decades. Imaged on bottom is a sketch of an A. muscaria sighted in South Africa reflecting widespread awareness of the fungus in this country.
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
Our new paper on the evolution and chemical ecology of the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria; aka the Super Mario mushroom 🍄) in the Global South is out now in New Phytologist. Read the full paper here: nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... 🧵 1/5
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Equipped for success: genomes and metabolomes of the European Amanita muscaria are conserved in its novel South African range
Plants and soils have been moved around the world for centuries, but invasive mushrooms receive scant attention. The Amanita muscaria species complex was introduced to South Africa in the context of...
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
Do you work with the Aspergillus fumigatus model isolates Af293 or CEA10? If so, we want to collaborate with you! In return for your lab's participation we will sequence your strain for free and provide co-authorship on the final paper. Learn more here: asp-fumi-seq-project-2025.vercel.app
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
Thanks Rauf!
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
Thanks Mark! Happy I get to stay with my Madison colleagues
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
(6/x) And that this fall I will be starting my own interdisciplinary postdoctoral research program at UW-Madison that will be at the intersection of proteomics, genomics, and natural products (managing my own budget and everything 🥹).
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
(5/x) All of that to say, I’m happy to announce that I am now Dr. Nickles (PhD).
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
(4/x) Weeks prior I was questioning if I was going to have to quit science altogether. Am just overwhelmed and beyond grateful for this opportunity. I can’t thank Dr. Nancy Keller and Dr. Milton Drott enough for their mentorship.
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
(3/x) The day of my defense, 55 min before it was to start, I got an email from UW-Madison notifying me that the school is giving me 250k to start my own research program under the mentorship of two amazing professors. All on a proposal I CAME UP WITH AND WROTE on antimicrobial drug discovery.
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
(2/x) I had been trying to obtain a postdoc or industry science position for the last 8 months. Several opportunities had been taken away from me from federal cuts to science. Nearly 100 applications later I went into my PhD defense bittersweet that I was graduating but into nothing.
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
(1/x) Yesterday will go down as one of the most monumental of my life.
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
Flight attendant: Is there a doctor on the plane? Me: Yes, but I'm not that kind of… Flight attendant: The pilots want to know about marine CO₂ removal and its role as a climate solution. Me: AT LAST!
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 14/05/2025
Thanks Dan !!
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Marie-Claire Harrison @marie-clairehar.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... new preprint on predicting antifungal drug resistance in yeasts is out!
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
Nice catch at thanks for clarifying. I do mean CDT!
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
3. The invasion of Amanita muscaria 🍄 into South Africa, viewed through a natural product lens! I'll discuss its geographic origins & the role its specialized metabolites may have played in its global success as an invader. (in revision)
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
2. The stepwise evolution of a highly unusual ICS-NRPS-like hybrid megasynthase! This fun story started with a targeted search into lichen BGC biodiversity, leading us to uncover the evolutionary origins of this 'one-enzyme' metabolic pathway now found in ~30% of Ascomycetes. (in preparation)
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
1. The evolution and diversity of a new class of fungal natural products that I characterized in 2023 (isocyanide synthase BGCs), where I showed they're the 5th most common BGC class in fungi! academic.oup.com/nar/article-...
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
Hello friends and colleagues! I'm giving my public defense on May 28th from 10-11am CST. Zoom link: uwmadison.zoom.us/j/99000991657 I'll be talking about the three different first-author papers from my PhD. For sneak previews of those chapters scroll down for the thread! 👇
Flyer showing the title and talk time for my dissertation. Location: MSB 1420. Date: May 28th @10am CST
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Keller Lab @kellerlab.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
New publication with the Huttenlocher Lab! Led by PhD candidate Nayanna Mercado Soto, we used zebrafish to study burn wound infections with Candida albicans & Aspergillus fumigatus, showing the innate immune response is highly conserved across fungal species. #fungi journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
journals.asm.org
Larval zebrafish burn wound infection model reveals conserved innate immune responses against diverse pathogenic fungi | mBio
Secondary fungal infections within burn wound injuries are a significant problem that delays wound healing and increases the risk of patient mortality. Currently, little is known about how fungi colon...
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
OH HELL YA NOT ANYMORE YIPPIIIIEEEEEEE
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
How it feels being a Wisconsin Susan Crawford voter waiting for the election results
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Dylan Duerre @dylanduerre.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
Excited to share that work from my PhD is now available in @natmetabolism.bsky.social! Here, we uncover a link between heme production, BCAA metabolism, and thermogenesis—implicating heme synthesis in #aging, #obesity, and #T2D. Link to paper: urldefense.com/v3/__https:/... A Thread (1/15)
urldefense.com
Haem biosynthesis regulates BCAA catabolism and thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue
Nature Metabolism - Inhibition of haem synthesis is shown to lead to the accumulation of branched-chain amino acids in the brown adipose tissue of mice, which reduces UCP1 levels and impairs...
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
To the PIs that take the time to find grad students at conferences with posters, you are appreciated!! Hearing someone else get amped about my work reminds me why I do science 🥰
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 05/01/2025
I’m in San Diego for the SIMB Natural Product Discovery and Development in the Genomic Era conference. Excited to hear about the research going on in other labs and to make new connections :)
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Never a doubt in my mind that Charli was taking it this year
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Ben Engel @cellarchlab.com · 29/11/2024
Online @cellpress.bsky.social, we reveal a protein shell that helps diatoms fix 20% of global #CO2 🧪🌊🌾🧶🧬🌍 Shimakawa et al: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Nam et al: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... @biozentrum.bsky.social press release: www.biozentrum.unibas.ch/news/detail/... Read on for more... 1/🧵
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
It’s crazy that 90% of the R&D bioinformatics jobs I’m seeing now require ML and AI development expertise while simultaneously advanced PhDs in biology or data science. If I had to guess only 5-10% of PhD level bioinformaticians actually know how to make advanced ML models.
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estella newcombe @estellaan.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
We did this crazy project where we tried to see if proteins could interact with their mirror image ligand. Seems impossible when proteins need to form 3D structures to interact. But what about if the interaction remains disordered??? www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Stereochemistry in the disorder–order continuum of protein interactions - Nature
Studies on protein–protein interactions using proteins containing d- or l-amino acids show that stereoselectivity of binding varies with the degree of disorder within the complex.
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Franciska de Vries 🟥 @frantecol.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
It’s out!! We subjected soils from 30 different locations across Europe to extreme events and found that soil fungal and bacterial communities showed consistent responses that could be predicted from their origin! With @knightjar.bsky.social and many collaborators! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Soil microbiomes show consistent and predictable responses to extreme events - Nature
Soils from 30 grasslands across Europe were subjected to 4 contrasting extreme climatic events under drought, flood, freezing and heat conditions, with the results suggesting that soil microbiomes fro...
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Sam Williams @samwill.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
Sure this will be super useful going forward for benchmarking and discovery 'MassSpecGym is the largest publicly available dataset of high-quality labeled MS/MS spectra' arxiv.org/html/2410.23...
arxiv.org
MassSpecGym: A benchmark for the discovery and identification of molecules
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Dr Katherine Duncan @kateduncan.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
If you are new to 🦋 and are interested in microbial natural products - here’s some starter packs to help connect us go.bsky.app/72NeGsT and go.bsky.app/4xnRN52 - there’s also one set up by @danudwary.secondarymetabolism.com here go.bsky.app/Q9svkYf
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
In my free time I enjoy playing hockey, am a massive concert junkie, and am a big dog lover. I'm also an urbanism geek and big advocate for reducing our dependence on cars. And I am looking for my next opportunity! I'm currently exploring different postdoc options
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Hi 🦋! My name is Grant Nickles, 5th year PhD student studying fungal natural products in the Keller lab @ UW-Madison. More specifically, I've been developing genome mining strategies to investigate poorly characterized non-canonical fungal pathways. academic.oup.com/nar/article/...
academic.oup.com
Mining for a new class of fungal natural products: the evolution, diversity, and distribution of isocyanide synthase biosynthetic gene clusters
Abstract. The products of non-canonical isocyanide synthase (ICS) biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) mediate pathogenesis, microbial competition, and metal-
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Hayden Clarkin @thetransitguy.com · 15/11/2024
If you've ever wondered why most new housing in America looks like the image on the left, rather than being more interesting and architecturally diverse like the building on the right, I have one explanation: single stair building codes 🧵
A mid-rise apartment building with a mix of brick and beige siding located on a busy street corner. The building has retail stores, including a CVS Pharmacy, on the ground level and residential units above. It features large windows, balconies, and several towers extending upward. Snow is visible on the ground, and cars are stopped at an intersection under a clear blue sky.
A mid-rise residential building with a unique curved brick facade and modern architectural design. The structure features large windows, decorative balconies, and greenery on the rooftop and balconies. Surrounded by trees and set in an urban environment, the building contrasts with the more rectangular neighboring structures under a partly cloudy sky.
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
Pretending I have my year in review with these monthly stats.fm summaries. Charlie is taking my top artist of 2024 I fear
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Grant Nickles @grantnickles.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
48% is SO high 😭. God I don’t envy climate and public health scientists over the next 4 years. They’re science policies strongest soldiers
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