Antony Ortiz Suárez
Universidad del Rosario, Columbia, visit supported by Erasmus, September 2023 – February 2024. Antony focused on ecology and evolution of Columbian ectomycorrhizal fungi with special emphasis on the members of the genus Russula. During his stay, he undergo micromorphological training and prepared several morphological profiles which are ready to be soon published.
Susana Villa Laschuetza
from University of Vigo, Spain, visited our lab for Student mobility traineeship Erasmus+ from 1st December 2023 to 30th May 2023. She practices her training in microscopy, molecular analyses and sequence editing on the genus Camarophyllopsis, that is an agaric member of family Clavariaceae. She plans to continue on this study as part of her master thesis at Goethe University Frankfurt Germany under supervision of prof. Meike Pieberbring and Slavomír Adamčík.
Felix Hampe
From Germany is a passionate mycologist organising citizen science research in Germany. He has a big heart for Russula. He accompanied Cathrin Manz during her both visits. He supported our research by observations on European Russula.
Cathrin and Felix
visited us also at 4th to 20th January 2023. We identified a new phylogenetic group of Russula in Benin that is frequent in the country and is important part of natural forest ecosystems. The groups evolved before split of Gondwana and is especially diverse in the Africa with only two known members outside the continent. Fruiting bodies of these ectomycorrhizal species are distinctly morphologically adapted to two types of forest ecosystem in Benin, savannah or gallery riparian rain forest.
Chance Noffsinger
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA, a visit from 13th to 22nd March 2022 funded by National Science Foundation grant (DEB-2030779). Chance is a PhD. student of prof. Brandon Matheny. He was focusing on adopting of microscopic techniques used for Russula morphology standards and Global Fungi data mining. We are preparing a study about delimitation and ecology of two boreal Russula species occurring in Rocky Mts. The photo show him with our lab members, from left Vasilii Shapkin, Miroslav Caboň and Chance Noffsinger.
Junaid Khan
from University of Swat, Pakistan, 3 months visit from 1st April to 30th June 2022. Junaid was working on unravelling of the diversity of an ectomycorrhizal genus Russula in Pakistan. Junaid’s collections and molecular phylogenetic studies have demonstrated that the Russula diversity in Pakistan is different from European continent and majority of species might be new to science. We are preparing studies on Pakistani Russula species related to European R. insignis and R. firmula.
Benjamin Avis
From Indiana University Northwest, Indiana, USA, travel fellowship of Indiana University Northwest, USA, 3rd February 2020 to 14th March 2020. Ben made full micromorphological descriptions of two North American foetid Russulas, we wait for a good season to improve our sampling in multilocus phylogeny and our knowledge of field aspect of the species. He visited us at the beginning of Covid-19 pandemic and had to finish his stay few days before expected stay end.
Munazza Kiran
From University of Punjab, Pakistan, two stays supported by fellowship of National Scholarship program SAIA, 1st April to 31st May 2019, 20th February 2020 to 12th July 2020. The first stay of Munazza was aimed to Russula systematics and resulted to new Russula species descriptions including a comprehensive study about bioclimatic adaptations of the Russula globispora lineage (https://doi.org/10.3390/life11070662). During the second stay she helped with our research of Dermoloma diversity https://doi.org/10.1007/s11557-020-01651-y.