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In my laboratory at Kew Gardens, we receive a lot of fungi from all over the UK. When a fresh fungus comes in our laboratories, we need to hurry: we must collect fresh samples for our analyses as soon as possible!

An example of fresh fungus called “witch’s butter” growing on a dead twig.

First of all, we want to try to culture the fungus, in order to produce a lot of mycelium. A mycelium is a branching mass of filaments that fungi use to pick up their nutrients in nature, and that scientists can reproduce in their laboratories using fresh fungi. How do we do it? It is quite simple, but we must be really clean and precise! Wearing gloves, we cut a tiny piece of fresh fungus and we place it into a sterile dish or in special flasks which contain all the nutrients the fungus needs for its growth. After some time, the fungus starts growing and produces an often colorful, beautiful mycelium. You never know what to expect!

Culturing fungi is always a surprise: you can end up with all sorts of textures, colours and weird shapes!

Sometimes we want our fungi to be comfy and to produce even more mycelium: we place them in flasks with juicy liquid nutrients. In this case, I added a bit of pony poo, because this particular fungus loves it!

Sometimes is really hard to accomodate our needy fungi, and unfortunately they do not grow. But fear not: we still have our fresh fungus! We cut more little pieces, we place them into a special preserving liquid and then into the freezer. When we get enough mycelium from our cultures, it also goes soaking into a preserving liquid and then straight to the freezer.

Our freezers are full of these tiny little tubes with pieces of fungi inside, ready for the next analyses.

What happens next? We use our preserved pieces of fungus or mycelium to extract DNA. We use special tools and chemicals to destroy the cells while keeping the DNA nice and intact. Sometimes, at the end of the process, we can even see the DNA floating inside the tube!

The white, fluffy mass floating inside the tube is fungal DNA.

Once the DNA is extracted, we need to make sure that it belongs to the fungus we initially thought. We select a region in the fungal genome called “barcode”, we sequence it and we compare it with sequences published by other scientists. If it’s the right fungus, it goes straight away to the Sanger Institute for genome sequencing. Exciting!

After a long day in the lab, I like roaming in our gardens, or peek into our Fungarium collection in search of fungal oddities. Job done!

After a long day in the lab, Kew Gardens offer a well deserved peace.

One of the 1.2 million fungi in our Fungarium collection: a sample of Poronia pileiformis collected in 1889!