Vilgalys Mycology Lab – Duke University

Jessie Uehling successfully defended her Ph.D. yesterday.  Congratulations Jessie!

Congratulations to Professor Khalid Hameed for receiving the President’s Volunteer Service award.  Khalid received this award for his volunteer work with US AID Farmer-to-Farmer program to support mushroom cultivation in the developing world.  He and Van Cotter recently presented a summary of this work at the recent MASMC conference.

MASMC 2017 Poster – Mushroom Cultivation Support Farmer-to-Farmer Program

Prepare to mass-inoculate!

As part of our NSF-funded study on coevolution of mycorrhizal fungi in the genus Suillus with members of the plant family Pinaceae, we just finished setting up a spore-print bioassay pairing 30 Suillus species with 10 different host trees from the conifer family Pinaceae.    The seedlings will be harvested after 2-3 months to test for mycorrhizal specificity with different groups of confier hosts.  Molina & Trappe (1982) first demonstrated  strong patterns of mycorrhizal specificity (compatible/incompatible) for 27 species of ectomycorrizal fungi grown with 7 species of Pinaceae hosts.  In our experiments, we are investigating molecular-based interactions that result in mycorrhizal compatibility  between Suillus with different species white pines (Pinus subg. Strobus), hard pines (subg. Pinus), Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga spp.), larch (Larix sp.) and spruce (Picea sp.).  See Liao et al. (2106) for more on molecular genetics of mycorrhizal compatibility/incompatibility!

Why 98 and 10?  That’s exactly how many seedlings (980) fit inside two of our R-chambers in the Duke Phytotron (plus uninoculated control plants).    Our team has collected spore prints and cultures from over 500 collections of Suillus from pine forests around the world.  It was hard deciding which spore prints to test!

References:
–Molina, R., and J. M. Trappe. 1982. Patterns of ectomycorrhizal host specificity and potential among Pacific Northwest conifers and fungi. Forest Science 28:423–458.
–Liao, H.-L., Y. Chen, and R. Vilgalys. 2016. Metatranscriptomic Study of Common and Host-Specific Patterns of Gene Expression between Pines and Their Symbiotic Ectomycorrhizal Fungi in the Genus Suillus. PLoS Genet 12:e1006348.

Our first  paper on compatibility/incompatibility in Suillus is finally out!  Suillus species are members of the bolete family that fruit in association with different members of the conifer family Pinaceae. Here’s what we report in this paper:
1. We tested 5 species of Suillus for ability to develop ectomycorrhizae on white pines (Pinus sect. Strobus) vs. hard pines (sect. Pinus).  Pairings between individual species of Suillus and Pinus were scored as ‘compatible’ or ‘incompatible’.
2. RNASeq analysis reveals that all of the Suillus species were able to germinate with  different pine hosts, but they (and their host) express different sets of genes during compatible vs. incompatible responses.
3. A distinct set of ‘core genes’ are expressed by both fungal and plant partners during compatible vs. incompatible interactions.

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/

Last week we went hunting for fungi in Vermont at Camp Neringa, a Lithuanian summer camp where I used to go as a kid.  The foray got a write up by author Laima Vince in the Huffington Post.  Even found some Suillus!

Alexander H. Smith – Dean of American Mycology

Mycologists and their students from  the Great Lakes region meet each fall for the A. H. Smith foray.  Alex Smith was my academic grandfather, widely known as the dean of  modern American mushroom taxonomy, and who taught mycology at Univ. of Michigan for 50 years.  This year’s Smith Foray took place in Smith’s favorite collecting site at the University of Michigan Field Station, located on Douglas Lake at the north end of Michigan’s lower peninsula.  The Foray was hosted by the Tim James lab at the Univ. of Michigan, with over 80 mycologists participating including several  Duke Mycology Alumni including Tim, Anne Pringle (Univ. Wisconsin), and Greg Bonito (Michigan State Univ.).  As you can see, we had excellent collecting!

This pre-conference field trip to the southern Sierra’s was a repeat performance of an earlier pre-meeting foray that took place in 1996 prior to the 1st International Conference on Mycorrhizae.   That conference was hosted by Tom Bruns and his colleagues from UC Berkeley, who also hosted this year’s Mycological Society meetings.

Using the Lake Shore Resort at Huntington Lake as our base camp, we collected fungi from the Sierra National Forest between 2000-3000 m.   The area is located between Yosemite and King’s Canyon National Parks.  This snowmelt-driven mountain ecosystem  is a famous evolutionary hotspot with many highly endemic plants and fungi, including a rich abundance of truffles and classic secotioid fungal species that represent ‘missing links’ in mushroom evolution (the “Secotioid Syndrome” described  by Harry Thiers,  1984, Mycologia 76:1–8).  I was also thrilled to find several species of Suillus for our ongoing genomics work, including S. megaporinus, a bizarre little bolete with a highly upturned pileus that closes back on itself to reveal a fully exposed pore surface (an ‘inverse truffle’).   These forests are full of so many beautiful trees that I could not stop photographing them, including Abies magnifica, Abies concolor, Pinus jeffreyi, Pinus lambertiana, Pinus monticola, Pinus contorta, Calocedrus decurrens and Sequoiadendron giganteum.  We also saw many beautiful mycoheterotophic species, including Pterospora and Sarcodes spp.  The foray organizers, Dan Luoma and Joyce Eberhardt did an amazing job transporting our eager group to and from the mountains.  We are all very grateful for their work to organize this fine little expedition prior to the MSA meetings!

Here are some of the cool fungi we found:

Here are some shots of the amazing forests and plants that we saw in the Sierras: