Congratulations Abhi on finishing a Master's Thesis!

Abhi Dighe successfully completed a Master's thesis that investigates signals of phylosymbiosis among a diverse set of foliar fungal endophytes and their host plants. Unlike most past studies, Abhi uses phylogenetic beta diversity to understand if the phylogenetic similarity among hosts or among fungal endophytes are correlated with the phylogenetic distance of the endophytes or hosts, respectively. He takes advantage of T-BAS, a new web tool for placing amplicon sequences onto reference trees, to create fungal phylogenies. He did not find widespread or consistent signals of phylosymbiosis, but this is just the beginning to better understand when and where we do find patterns of phylosymbiosis in this ubiquitous and diverse symbiotic system. Thank you to Cherie Briggs and Rodolfo Salas-Lizana for serving on his committee. Please check out his thesis in the link above!