If a tree falls in the forest — whether or not anyone registers the sound — one thing is for sure: there are lots of fungi around. Within a forest’s soil, hundreds of species decompose debris, mobilize nutrients from that decay, and deliver those nutrients to tree roots and soil. These fungi help shape a forest’s ecology. They store carbon and cycle key nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus.
This way, the fungi of forest soils hold keys to tree health and carbon storage — skills that matter increasingly as the climate warms. However, these are complicated interactions to untangle. Fungi work in cooperation to support a forest, and species vary across Earth’s ecosystems.
Recently, in work published in New Phytologist, researchers have pioneered new understanding of which fungi take on certain functions at the forest floor. For the first time, they compared three different fungal guilds in a range of different locations. They sampled soils in four forest ecosystems, extracted RNA to understand gene expression, and developed new tools to map that soil RNA to fungal genomes.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) sequenced 1 trillion bases — a terabase — of soil RNA for this project, and produced the reference genomes that allowed for mapping these RNA reads. “Currently, this is the largest JGI-sequenced fungal metatranscriptome yet,” said Igor Grigoriev, Fungal Genomics Program Head at the JGI.
Along with an improved understanding of multiple forest systems, this work sets up protocols and pipelines that other teams can use around the world. Learn more on the JGI website.
