In general I am interested in how large scale genome rearrangements allow fungi to rapidly adapt to new environments. This includes the newly described Starships, giant cargo-carrying transposable elements with the ability to transfer horizontally. At Quadram much of my work will focus on fungal food contaminants in order to understand how changes to their genome allow them circumvent preservation techniques in industrial settings.

Before Quadram, I was a post-doc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Plant Pathology Department where similarly I used plant pathogens as models in order to understand both the basic biology of Starships and how they influence fungal pathogenicity. Prior to that I was a Post-doc at the Universite Paris-Saclay working on how Starships have influenced the domestication of fungi used for food production, particularly cheese.

Key publications

O’Donnell S, McVey A, Valent B, Liu S, Gluck-Thaler E, Cook D (2026). Distinct modes of sequence evolution and epigenetic modifications characterize Starship-mediated variation in Pyricularia fungal plant pathogens. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.01.28.702382

Urquhart A, O’Donnell S, Gluck-Thaler E, Vogan A (2025). A natural mechanism of eukaryotic horizontal gene transfer. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.02.28.640899

O’Donnell S, Rezende G, Vernadet JP, Snirc A, Ropars J (2025). Harbouring Starships: The accumulation of large Horizontal Gene Transfers in Domesticated and Pathogenic Fungi. Genome Biology and Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf125

O’Donnell S, Yue J, Abou-Saada O, Agier N, Caradec C, Cokelaer T, De-Chiara M, Delmas S, Dutreux F, Fournier T, Friedrich A Kornobis E, Li J, Miao Z, Tattini L, Schacherer J, Liti G, Fischer G (2023). Telomere-to-telomere assemblies of 142 strains characterize the genome structural landscape in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Nature Genetics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-023-01459-y