These fungi are part of the genus Lentinula, which have evolved to decompose hardwoods on every continent besides Europe and Antarctica. Lentinula mushrooms are white rot fungi, belonging to an elite group of decomposers that can break down all of wood’s components — cellulose, hemicellulose, and the toughest molecule, lignin. Understanding Lentinula genomes and their evolution could provide strategies for converting plant waste into sugars for biofuel production.
JGI Looks to Soil to Understand Forest Recovery After Wildfires
Within a forest’s soil, a microbiome of bacteria, viruses and fungi process carbon and nitrogen, paving the way for future plants and trees to grow. However, fire changes the microbes within the soil. Recently, JGI collaborators worked to understand which microbes in the soil persist after a wildfire — and why they thrive. Their results appear in Nature Microbiology.
JGI Helps Shed Light on How Antarctic Algae Have Adapted to Cold
In Nature Ecology and Evolution, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, the University of East Anglia, and the JGI have explored the genome of the polar algae Microglena sp. YARC. The green alga harbors extra genes for proteins requiring zinc, and those genes turn out to be key for the phytoplankton’s ability to live in cold polar waters. Learn more here on the JGI website.
JGI Helps Determine Fungal Friends or Foes in Plant Roots
In Nature Communications, an international team involving researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research (MPIPZ), the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) and the JGI uncovered associations between plant roots and fungi that can help or harm plant host health. They compared the genomes of fungi that colonize Arabidopsis thaliana roots with genomes from other plant-associated fungi. Learn more here on the JGI website.
JGI Helps Uncover How Climate Change Threatens the Base of Polar Oceans’ Food Webs
The cold polar oceans give rise to some of the largest food webs on Earth. And at their base are microscopic, photosynthetic algae. But human-induced climate change, a new study suggests, is displacing these important cold-water communities of algae with warm-adapted ones, a trend that threatens to destabilize the delicate marine food web and change the oceans as we know them.
The JGI Community Sequencing Program enabled the discovery of these worrisome circumstances for algal communities. Click here to read the news release on the JGI website.
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