Carolyn Worthington

Carolyn Worthington completed her MS degree in Plant Pathology at North Carolina State University in July 2011, having previously obtained a BS in Biological Sciences from NCSU in 2008. As an undergraduate, she began working in Dr. Ignazio Carbone’s lab, studying mating type idiomorphs in Aspergillus section Flavi and mitochondrial inheritance in Petromyces parasiticus. Her thesis work examined interspecific crosses between Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus for mycotoxin diversity and genome heterogeneity. A significant component of her work was to test methodologies to detect fungal hybrids in nature, using the A. parasiticus x A. flavus interspecific cross as a model system. Carolyn tested various tools implemented in the SNAP Workbench Portal for multidimensional scaling of data, as well as exploring new approaches for detecting admixture and hybridization among closely related species. The data generated from Carolyn's thesis work provided a useful resource to further test new methods that quantify the magnitude of admixture and hybridization in nature.