![]() Even the humble baker’s yeast, which underpins our everyday food and drinks, can be used in the lab to study human genetics or modified to produce important compounds. We live on a planet of finite resources, so it’s thanks to these little fungi doing the work to recycle them that our natural world can exist at all.Ĭountless fungi play key roles in modern society: they can be a source of medicines such as antibiotics and immunosuppressants, industrial enzymes for detergents and manufacturing, and new biomaterials to replace plastics. There are also the recyclers (“saprotrophs”), which break down organic matter and return nutrients to the soil in the continuous cycle of life and death. With our increased global travel and trade, not to mention our contributions to climate change, we’re creating a perfect opportunity for new fungal pathogens to emerge and thrive.īut there’s so much more than just the pathogens. ![]() These tend to be the fungi that get the most attention, both in terms of public awareness and scientific research and not without some good reason. Yes, some will be pathogens, which can cause disease in plants and animals. But that doesn’t mean they’re unimportant. These microscopic fungi, or more simply “microfungi”, are invisible to the naked eye, and so for a long time have remained under the radar. We’ve barely scratched the surface, and I mean that quite literally – countless fungi will be underground and inside other organisms. Other recent estimates for fungal diversity have ranged widely from 2.2 million to 165 million species – but no matter which you go with, the numbers are all far greater than the 150,000 fungi which scientists have already found and described. To put that in context, that would mean our planet is inhabited by 15 times more fungi than plants. The latest estimate of the total number of fungal species is 6.2 million. I really can’t emphasize enough how much of an oversight this is. The proportion of scientific papers published each year for animals, plants and fungi. Long story short, fungi are incredibly understudied compared to their sister kingdoms of animals and plants. This leads to fewer researchers studying fungi that can teach students about fungi and … you get the picture. Yet this is the typical experience in both school and higher education (in the UK and the US at least) and, unsurprisingly, when you don’t teach students about fungi, they don’t go on to study fungi. ![]() Given that fungi are a whole kingdom of species that, alongside animals and plants, belong to the major domain of planet Earth’s multicellular life together called the “ eukaryotes”, this is perhaps surprising. For one thing, fungi barely appeared in my degree, and when they did it was usually in the negative context of causing disease. If only I had an anecdote about my time as a biology undergraduate looking down the microscope at some spores for the first time, overcome by their sheer majesty – but that would be fiction. I can’t remember the moment when I first decided to study fungi. In the first study of its kind, to our knowledge, in a major seed bank, we found hundreds of fungi hidden inside seeds from the Millennium Seed Bank, some of which are likely to be species new to science and could be crucial for the future of plant health. We’d extracted enough DNA that the freezer, stuffed full of tubes, threatened to revolt.įinally, the time had come for me to analyze all the data, and discover just what we’d managed to find after all these months of work. We’d built a fungus city: great tower-blocks of petri dishes stacked on the lab workbenches, with different colors, textures and shapes of fungi all emerging inside. We’d spent countless hours meticulously sterilizing seeds (1,710, to be specific), filling the lab with a cacophony of rattling as we shook them in bleach.
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