Ignazio Carbone

About

Ignazio Carbone is a Professor and Director of the Center for Integrated Fungal Research (CIFR) and the Plant Disease and Insect Clinic at NC State University within the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. His research interests encompass evolutionary biology, molecular population genetics, and genomics, with an interdisciplinary approach that combines sampling of genetic and phenotypic variation in natural fungal populations, comparative analyses of fungal genomes, and the development of integrative evolutionary analysis tools. A significant aspect of his work involves developing methodologies and tools to examine the influence of mutation, recombination, gene flow, selection, and demography on the evolution of fungal genomes, populations, and species. His research also focuses on the evolution of fungal secondary metabolism, particularly the biosynthetic pathways of compounds such as sterigmatocystin, O-methylsterigmatocystin, and aflatoxin in Aspergillus species, aiming to understand their biological and evolutionary significance. Carbone teaches graduate courses in plant-microbe interactions and evolutionary and population genetic data analysis, contributing to the education of students in these fields.

Research topics

• Biology
• Botany
• Ecology
• Genetics
• Biochemistry
• Geography
• Virology
• Bioinformatics
• Computational biology
• Microbiology

Selected publications

• Climate and seasonality drive the richness and composition of tropical fungal endophytes at a landscape scale

  Communications Biology · 2021 · 101 citations

  Understanding how species-rich communities persist is a foundational question in ecology. In tropical forests, tree diversity is structured by edaphic factors, climate, and biotic interactions, with seasonality playing an essential role at landscape scales: wetter and less seasonal forests typically harbor higher tree diversity than more seasonal forests. We posited that the abiotic factors shaping tree diversity extend to hyperdiverse symbionts in leaves-fungal endophytes-that influence plant h…

  DOI

• Methodological Approaches Frame Insights into Endophyte Richness and Community Composition

  Microbial Ecology · 2021 · 25 citations

  DOI

• An experimental strategy for preparing circular ssDNA virus genomes for next-generation sequencing

  Journal of Virological Methods · 2021 · 22 citations

  The ability of begomoviruses to evolve rapidly threatens many crops and underscores the importance of detecting these viruses quickly and to understand their genome diversity. This study presents an improved protocol for the enhanced amplification and enrichment of begomovirus DNA for use in next generation sequencing of the viral genomes. An enhanced rolling circle amplification (RCA) method using EquiPhi29 polymerase was combined with size selection to generate a cost-effective, short-read seq…

  PublisherDOI

• Ancient Rapid Radiation Explains Most Conflicts Among Gene Trees and Well-Supported Phylogenomic Trees of Nostocalean Cyanobacteria

  Systematic Biology · 2023-02-24 · 20 citations

  articleOpen access

  Prokaryotic genomes are often considered to be mosaics of genes that do not necessarily share the same evolutionary history due to widespread horizontal gene transfers (HGTs). Consequently, representing evolutionary relationships of prokaryotes as bifurcating trees has long been controversial. However, studies reporting conflicts among gene trees derived from phylogenomic data sets have shown that these conflicts can be the result of artifacts or evolutionary processes other than HGT, such as in…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An open-access T-BAS phylogeny for emerging Phytophthora species

  PLoS ONE · 2023-04-03 · 15 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Phytophthora species cause severe diseases on food, forest, and ornamental crops. Since the genus was described in 1876, it has expanded to comprise over 190 formally described species. There is a need for an open access phylogenetic tool that centralizes diverse streams of sequence data and metadata to facilitate research and identification of Phytophthora species. We used the Tree-Based Alignment Selector Toolkit (T-BAS) to develop a phylogeny of 192 formally described species and 33 informal…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Filling the largest void of the fungal genealogy of life (the Pezizomycotina) and integrating symbiotic, environmental and physiological data layers

  NSF · $480k · 2016–2020

• Dimensions: Collaborative Research: An Interdisciplinary Study of Hyperdiverse Endophytic Fungi and Their Function in Boreal Forests

  NSF · $450k · 2011–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Bruce W. Horn

  United States Department of Agriculture

  32 shared

• Linda M. Kohn

  Umeå University

  25 shared

• Geromy G. Moore

  Southern Regional Research Center

  22 shared

• P. S. Ojiambo

  North Carolina State University

  18 shared

• Deepak Bhatnagar

  Southern Regional Research Center

  14 shared

• Jean B. Ristaino

  North Carolina State University

  14 shared

• Jeffrey W. Cary

  Southern Regional Research Center

  13 shared

• A. Elizabeth Arnold

  University of Arizona

  13 shared

Labs

• Structural Pest Management Training & Research FacilityPI

Education

• Ph.D., Entomology

  University of California, Berkeley

  1995

• M.S., Entomology

  University of California, Berkeley

  1991

• B.S., Entomology

  University of California, Berkeley

  1988

Similar researchers at North Carolina State University

• Coby Schalh-60
• Peter Balint-Kurtih-60
• Anna Whitfieldh-41