In February, 2024, SPUN and JR Biotek co-hosted the African Mycorrhizal Mapping and Metagenomics Workshop in Kumasi, Ghana in partnership with Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) and CSIR - Crops Research Institute. The workshop was co-led by Dr. Bethan Manley, who sat down with workshop participant Dr. Jacob Ulzen of University of Ghana to talk about his experience.

In the race to map underground fungi before they are gone, it is imperative that we enlist the best mycorrhizal researchers from everywhere in the world, and we found we had a gap in the amount of research coming out of the Global South. In an effort to remedy this, we created the Underground Explorers program to support mycorrhizal researchers from the Global South, and underfunded countries.

Most mycorrhizal fungi live their entire lives underground – many of them don’t even make mushrooms, the fruiting bodies of fungi that pop up above the soil level. The hidden nature of these organisms can make studying them particularly challenging. For organisms like plants and animals, scientists can gather observational data, counting and recording or tagging study subjects. When it comes to belowground fungi and microbes, these surveys become more complicated.

Há já algum tempo que sabemos que o carbono flui das plantas para os fungos micorrízicos. É uma das peças centrais deste tipo de simbiose planta-fungo. Mas até agora, não tínhamos uma boa estimativa global da quantidade desse fluxo de carbono. Com esta revisão, o nosso objetivo foi sintetizar todos os dados atualmente disponíveis para tentar compreender melhor esta componente negligenciada do ciclo do carbono.