Metagenomics and diversity in truffieres

I think I never stayed so long without writing a post. Apologize for that. The South African trip has been long and busy 🙂

I´m just preparing the lecture I will do in Cahors in 2 weeks and re-checking all the data we got from one of our latest research, and its a lot of fun trying to digest it and extract conclusions.

Let me attach here a couple of the slides. We did several metagenomic analysis on truffieres, using Ion Torrent technique. This is, we amplify and sequence all fungal DNA from brûles. It´s amazing the huge biodiversity in a place where almost no weeds may grow…

Because every truffle growers is using spanish wells to add mating types to the soil, we did another experiment adding 3 truffle spores doses and inoculating in two different months and later quantifying the total truffle mycelium and again if the biodiversity has changed in the brûle, and we can see how the percentage or frequency of Tuber sequences change depending on treatments!

The results have a direct application in the development of new technologies for truffle farming:

-traceability of fungal mycelium

-methods to increase yields

-to evaluate the effects of different managements in beneficial microbial communities for the ecosystem (biodiversity).

As metagenomic results are quantitative, this technique may be useful for studies on diversity dynamics after plantation management, as well as to identify fungal species associated (positively or negatively) to Tuber persistence. I.e. when we compare productive and non productive trees, we see like Scleroderma is significantly more present, with 17% of the DNA sequences, in productive trees (see slide 2).

See you in Cahors!

All the best from Barcelona!

Marcos S. Morcillo

 

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