By Simon BurdgeFinancial Post staff writerA study released on Monday by the National Institute of Botanical Research shows that the Pmbok fungus is the largest species of botanical fungus on earth.
“The Pmboki is a fascinating fungus that is one of the most interesting species in the world, with a wide range of different forms and varieties that can be found in many different habitats around the world,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. John R. Dennison.
Dennison, a graduate student in plant pathology at Cornell University, said the findings were a “very important milestone” for understanding how the fungus’s species composition varies over time.
“This is a very interesting study that shows that species composition is changing and that there are very many different species of fungi that inhabit our environments, from small tropical forests to temperate rainforests, and we really need to understand how these species change over time,” Dennion said.
In this new study, researchers found that the genus Pmbkok, which was first described in 1871, has been isolated from a number of different locations throughout South Africa, but has remained relatively stable over time due to its ability to adapt to new environments.
“I was surprised by the number of differences between the different genera that we found, and how different they are in terms of morphology, genetics, ecology, and ecology and evolution,” Denny said.
Denny and his team studied more than 2,200 Pmboks collected from a variety of habitats across South Africa and the rest of the continent, as well as from the Amazon.
The fungus was originally discovered in the rainforest of Mozambique in 1975, but its presence in tropical rainforelands throughout South America and Asia has made it a major source of new biodiversity.
“We found that Pmboko is a really diverse species and there’s a lot of diversity between the species,” Dennis said.
“In fact, you could even call it a monophyletic species, in that the species that are present in different habitats are different and can vary in the abundance of their spores.”
Denny said the researchers used a new method to determine the total number of species present, and the number they found varied from one species to the next.
“It was actually the first time that we had a systematic method to count the number, which is really exciting, because that means we have this really robust way to measure species diversity and we can see what species are present on a per-species basis,” DENNION said.
It’s a fascinating study that showed that species have different characteristics in different environments, and that we have a large number of PmbOK species that we can’t detect with our methods.
Denny and co-author, Dr, Andrew G. J. M. Rizzuto, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Queensland, were also surprised by how many different varieties of PMBOK exist in different places around the globe.
The study’s results suggest that there may be a broad diversity of PKBok species across different regions of the world.
“There’s probably a wide variety of Pkbok that we’re not aware of,” Denna said.
“The fact that we’ve found a diversity of species from different regions in South Africa is really encouraging because we’ve really only known about one species of Pkgok.”
The researchers also found that many PMBoks were not found in the same places, but that they all had very similar morphology.
“Pmbok is a relatively small fungus and its size is relatively low, and so it’s more like a single species, whereas other species are found in larger groups and it’s hard to detect in smaller ones,” Deney said.
The new research could have practical implications for the study of PGBok.
“If we can find the species diversity that exists in a particular place, then we can go back and try to replicate it in a larger number of places,” Drennan said.
There are currently two major theories as to why Pmboka and other PMBoka species have been isolated in different locations around the planet.
Dennis and Dennio believe that PMBoko has been transported to other regions by human activity, but there are many other possibilities as well.
“At the moment, we think the most likely explanation is that humans are using Pmbka as an agricultural tool, and Pmbkok has been introduced to agriculture to feed livestock, which means there’s probably some sort of genetic link between Pmb and Pkb, and then there are some other things that could be contributing to the isolation,” Densin said.
For the study, the researchers collected Pmboku spores in an effort to determine which species were present in the soil and which were isolated.
“What we found was that there were a variety [of species], and