Over the last few months, I’ve been looking into various grad school programs and labs that fit my interests. I managed to find one that I really like and the PI already told me to apply! I am keeping my fingers crossed, because I genuinely want the position but I still won’t know for some time if it’ll come to fruition. Anyways, while we were chatting, I asked him for book recommendations, and he gave me the title of the textbook he uses for his class: 21st Century Guidebook to Fungi 2nd Edition. Like the good little student I am, I purchased the textbook and brought it with me to Honduras to start cracking into. Since mycology is hugely understudied (and I need a more foolproof way to take notes here given my original notebook got a bit waterlogged from an unexpected and extremely sudden downpour), I figured I’d write little summaries of each chapter here on the world wide web.
The first chapter introduces the field and digs (pun fully intended) into soil/geomycology. Simply put, there are many misconceptions of fungi held in both the public eye as well as in professional scientific settings. It is easy to confuse fungi as a plant or bacteria when so few institutions spend more than a second of their class time learning about them. In reality, they support life as we know it, from indirectly giving us O2 through the plants they aid to providing us with sustenance via their enzymes, or again, through the plants they aid. We also don’t know as much about them as we could; there are millions of species of fungi yet only about 120,000-150,000 species have been described.
Fungi’s role with the environment takes many forms, but in this chapter their interactions with soil is reviewed. Soil has three phases: solid, which is mineral and organic matter; liquid, which is “soil solution”; and gas, which is the soil atmosphere. The solid phase’s rocks and minerals are cycled, transformed, and chemically weathered by fungi. Organic soil forms when there is more organic matter than inorganic. This typically happens in cold, wet environments and from this can come peat. It also seems as though temperature is the only major hurdle when it comes to where fungi can live. A major takeaway is that soil is a living system. It takes decades to build that system, and can be up to a century before the soil populations stabilize both vertically and horizontally.
Lastly, fungal diversity is a hot topic, often debated due to differences in opinions over proper methods of identifying species. Since a majority of species can’t be grown in vitro, DNA analysis and other molecular approaches are sometimes used. It begs the questions: is only seeing their DNA a true way to classify some species? Many disagree since there is room for error in these practices, yet it can be argued that the other way around is equally dicey. I personally feel that the right answer lies in a nice middle ground– if I go bird watching and identify a bird strictly by call, many would say that is a valid method. Yet, I lose out on a lot of information and am prone to much error this way. Such techniques must be used with caution and supporting data. Overall, mycology is a still-budding field (pun fully intended part 2) and this chapter only covers the basics.
Happy reading,
-Beppa