Farhana Runa

I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Plant Pathology at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and working with Dr. Gary Payne and Dr. Ignazio Carbone. I did my BS in Microbiology from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. My research background was based on Mycobacterium tuberculosis to evaluate diagnosis methods of tuberculosis. I joined Dr. Barry Pryor’s lab at the University of Arizona where I got opportunity to work on filamentous fungi. I worked on Alternaria, Ulocladium and other related species and completed my MS in Plant Pathology. Significant components of my MS research were to develop random insertional mutagenesis in Alternaria by Agrobacterium mediated transformation system and to study Ulocladium systematics to reinvent their taxonomic and phylogenetic status. My Ph.D. research is to look at the nuclear condition of Aspergillus flavus. The conidia of Aspergillus flavus are multinucleate, but it is unknown whether they are homokaryotic or heterokaryotic. The ontogeny and function of multiple nuclei in conidia and their role in the ecology of the fungus are also unknown. The overall goal of my research is to understand the mechanism of multinucleate conidiation in A.flavus and the impact of nuclear condition on the production of secondary metabolites.