Abstract
Fungi form a large group of organisms of major ecological importance as nutrient cyclers, but their inconspicuous - often subterranean - nature makes them difficult to study. Technological advances in DNA sequencing have however made it possible to recover fungi and fungal communities from substrates such as soil and wood. Worryingly, the fungi retrieved from environmental sequencing tend not to be known by science such that these results are neither anchored in, nor used to enrich, mycology at large. The disconnect between environmental sampling of fungi and fungal systematics has reached a point where these disciplines are pursued nearly independently of one another, to the detriment of everyone using fungal sequence data for research purposes. With the UNITE database for molecular identification of fungi (http://unite.ut.ee) as baseline, the present project will re-associate these disciplines though providing the conceptual and methodological framework for precise interdisciplinary communication on - and comprehensive comparison of - fungal species and communities recovered through sequencing. The core of the proposal is an incremental, self-updating molecular key to, and data mining for, all species of fungi ever recovered by DNA sequencing. The project seeks to ensure that the growing number of researchers from different branches of the life sciences who now sequence fungi will be able to draw from, as well as add to, the corpus of mycological knowledge in a unified way.
Sweden