Fungi Could Be Helping Old-Growth Trees Survive Climate Change – The Atlantic

Source: Fungi Could Be Helping Old-Growth Trees Survive Climate Change – The Atlantic

…

At least 90 percent of fungal species likely out there are as of yet undiscovered, even though mycologists identify about 2,500 new ones each year. Kiers’s team was collecting fungal DNA simply to “see who’s here,” Kiers said, her hands in the dirt. But the trip’s primary goal was finding RNA, which has even more to say: It could tell scientists what the fungi were doing at the base of the chestnut tree. Were they decomposing leaf litter? Were they siphoning up water, piping it through their network to plants? Maybe they were transporting phosphorus and nitrogen that they had isolated out of the soil, in exchange for carbon the tree had made from sunlight. All of this assistance is, remarkably, the domain of fungi. Any one of these fungal actions, or all of them together, could have made the tree more resilient to the stresses of drought and fire. And if that’s true, it also matters exactly which fungi are doing that work.

What this team was doing had never really been done. Scientists extract RNA from fungi grown in the calm sterility of labs, but not typically from wild soil. “Soil has so many contaminants,” Francis Martin, a molecular biologist at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment who studies tree-microbe interactions, told me while crouched in the dirt, the chestnut’s emerald leaves dangling behind him. Doing science outdoors is always more messy. Life in the real world is densely layered and hard to separate. All of it, the aphids, the mites, the probably 10,000 species of bacteria, the viruses—“We don’t know anything about the viruses,” Kiers said—counts as “contamination,” from which your true subject must be isolated. And then those subjects, the 200 or 300 fungal species that Martin estimated were in the top four millimeters of soil in this spot, must be teased apart from one another too.