Russian Scientists Are the First to Decipher a Honey Fungus Genome

They checked mushrooms for "hazard" and found a method to lower it. Krasnoyarsk scientists from the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science, together with colleagues from Novosibirsk and Canada, deciphered genomes of four types of honey agarics. The answer to a genetic problem will help to reduce the "hazard" of this world of wildlife.

Specialists found out that many types of honey fungus spread out up to the huge sizes and lead to inevitable death of woody plants. According to scientists, "harmless" honey fungi can easily become pathogenic and kill trees worldwide. Researchers give example of a huge mycelium of dark honey fungus in the State of Oregon which occupies an area of 880 hectares.

Biologists and geneticists hope that their joint work will help to reveal all mushroom secrets: study their evolution and understand the systems of mushroom cell interaction.

"We completely sequenced, collected and annotated circular mitogenomes of four types of honey fungus: A. borealis, A. gallica, A. sinapina and A. solidipes, as well as the nuclear genome of A. borealis. We hope to come to better understanding of mechanisms of their harmful impact on trees, and to develop more effective methods of forest protection", said Konstantin Krutovsky, the research director and the Head of the Laboratory of Forest Genomics of SibFU.

By the way, in Krasnoyarsk Krai, honey fungi also give big problems to the forest. To the north of the region, honey fungi "dry up" conifers. For this reason, the men of science decided to study mushroom "hazard", connected, at a rough guess, with climatic changes.