N. Louise Glass
University of California, Berkeley
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Primary Section: 26, Genetics Secondary Section: 61, Animal, Nutritional, and Applied Microbial Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2021)
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Biosketch
N. Louise Glass is fungal biologist/mycologist recognized for her work on molecular mechanisms of fungal communication, programmed cell death and regulatory networks associated with fungal deconstruction of plant biomass. Glass was born in Beaufort, South Carolina and grew up in Littleton, Colorado. She graduated from Colorado State University with a degree in biology, received her Ph.D. from the University of California-Davis in plant pathology and performed her post-doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on fungal genetics and molecular biology. Glass joined the University of British Columbia Biotechnology Laboratory and Botany Department in 1989 as an assistant professor. In 1999, Glass was recruited to the Plant and Microbial Biology Department at UC-Berkeley. Glass is the UCB Fred E. Dickinson Chair of Wood Science and Technology, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM), a fellow of the Mycological Society of America (MSA) and a member of National Academy of Sciences.
Research Interests
The N. Louise Glass laboratory works on molecular mechanisms of communication involved in cooperation versus competition among fungi, including allorecognition, a project that has been instrumental in defining molecular mechanisms of innate immunity in filamentous fungi. As part of this program, the Glass laboratory has been focused on signaling mechanisms associated with communication and cell fusion in filamentous fungi, which is required to form the syncytial, interconnected network characteristic of these organisms. In other eukaryotic species, cell fusion to form syncytial cells is a common developmental program. The second major program in the Glass laboratory has been focused on dissecting transcriptional regulatory networks in filamentous fungi associated with nutrient acquisition and plant biomass deconstruction using systems biology approaches. This work has applications to industrially relevant fungi for bioenergy and industrial enzyme/protein production. To enable this work, the Glass laboratory is developing high throughput functional genomics methods for filamentous fungi.
