Issy Kite Last week, our team had the amazing opportunity to visit Windsor Great Park and see their amazing collection of ancient and veteran trees and collect some samples! The number of ancient trees was incredible to witness and we saw many signs of wood decay fungi on the oaks. Rich showed all of us how to take a core sample out of the trees aseptically and then we tried it out for ourselves. Many of the trees showed major signs of decay, like hollows. We were able to find a few mushrooms in the woodland area but were out of season to see a lot of the common fungi that would be present ..read more

Happy International Women’s Day to all you incredible scientists out there! We here in the mycology group are proud of all the incredible women who are and have been a part of this fantastic team! A special shout out of course goes to Professor Lynne Boddy, a truly inspiring woman in STEM. We hope you have all had a wonderful day! Many lovely women in STEM (and Jordan ..read more

The lab here at Cardiff have been busy working away on a number of projects surrounding the fungal communities that exist within oak trees in the UK (primarily Quercus robur). Our current PhD student Rich Wright has been exploring this topic in great detail alongside a team of undergraduate students, via slice experiments and core sampling of trees, woodblock experiments in the lab, and interactions experiments across different agar mediums. Matt Wainhouse has completed most of his lab and fieldwork for his PhD at Cardiff on heart rot communities in trees and just published an interesting pape ..read more

A beech tree being hollowed out by a Ganoderma fungus. We are now well into mushroom season. These, and other fungal fruiting structures, are often described as like apples on a tree. This analogy is due to the fact that mushrooms bear the reproductive propagules that are subsequently dispersed through the local environment and sometimes farther afield. But unlike apples, mushrooms do not contain seed. Fungi produce spores that are usually less than 0.01 millimetres in size; even the smallest known plant seeds are considerably larger. For some fungi, production of a mushroom or fruit body is e ..read more

Jade O’Leary Wood decay is brought about by a community of fungi which interact antagonistically with each other, causing the community composition to change. My PhD project explores the interactions of fungi when they are in competition for a wood resource, and the implications of those interactions to wood decay. In March 2016, I travelled to Richland, Washington State, USA for a 3 month period to work on a collaborative project funded by the US Department of Energy (DoE). There, at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL (Fig. 1)), I was able to further my research using cut ..read more

Jade O’Leary I am writing this blog shortly after the closing of the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) Genomics of Energy and the Environment Meeting in the beautiful Walnut Creek, California. I have to say that I thought the conference was brilliant, showcasing the range of technologies available at the JGI and the projects that it has supported. The JGI is a Department of Energy (DOE) funded user facility focused on large-scale sequence-based genomic projects that address questions related to sustainable biofuel production, global carbon cycling and biogeochemistry. Particularly interesting is ..read more

Hypholoma fighting Phanerochaete – Lynne Boddy Fungi rarely live alone, so they frequently encounter other fungi, bacteria and invertebrates, and sometimes vertebrates too. Like animals, fungi can distinguish self from non-self. When one mycelium (the main body of the fungus, comprising a network of fine filaments, termed hyphae) meets another, chemical recognition shows whether it is a different species, a different individual of the same species or, indeed, itself. We can clearly see the location of different individual fungi if we cut a slice from a log. Typically there are lots of continuo ..read more

The team in Prague Jade O’Leary During the first week of December four of the Cardiff Fungal Ecology group ventured to Prague, Czech Republic, to attend the second “Ecology of Soil Microorganisms” conference. The meeting set out to address questions regarding individual microbes, and microbial communities as well as their interactions with the environment and other soil biota by linking modern molecular “omics” methods with biochemical and soil chemical based approaches, and the exploration of soil fauna and plant ecology. Sarah Johnston, Jade O’Leary and Marta Misiak, as well as one of our ..read more

Midnight sun Marta Misiak Where is the best place to study Arctic Mycology? The high Arctic is the answer! Last month one of the members of the Fungal Ecology group (Marta) attended a month long course on Arctic Mycology at University of Svalbard, Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen, Norway at 78°N. It is the world’s northernmost institution for higher education and research. As it was summertime, it was a 24hr light day – plenty of time to study fungi!! We did study hard. The course was a combination of lectures, seminars, fieldwork, laboratory work, field trips and data analysis with main aim of int ..read more

Emma Gilmartin Last week members of the Fungal Ecology group attended ‘The Invasive Fungus’ focused meeting organised by the Society for General Microbiology and the British Mycological Society. Held in Manchester, the meeting aimed to bring together fungal researchers at the level of the hypha. Sessions over three days covered the broad topics of hyphal growth, invasion of plant and animal tissues, through to invasion of ecological environments. From left to right: Jade, Emma, Sarah and Lynne standing by Emma’s poster. We particularly enjoyed hearing from Raymond St. Leger (Uni. Maryland) o ..read more