Rethinking fungal ecology in the era of omics and computational tools

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2020

End date

12/31/2023

Budget

479,700 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

Overall assessments of forest dead wood are conducted in numerous countries, as a part of national forest inventories. Yet, we still lack detailed experiments, including field-based methods, to understand the process of wood decomposition and the mechanisms underlying adaptation and driving interactions among wood decomposers. Deadwood is a dynamic and complex ecological niche in which wood-inhabiting fungi are one of the most important component, and play an key role recycling nutrients in the forest ecosystem. In the project POLOMICS, we propose a novel framework, integrating omics approaches to explore ecological and evolutionary mechanisms underlying wood decomposition. The project takes advantage of the Big data era, a large consortium dedicated to fungi genome sequencing and the availability of in vitro and in-situ transcriptomics datasets to test, through experimental set-up, centuries of mycological observations. By answering ecological questions using a "reverse ecology" framework, we aim for a better understanding of empirical observations in the natural environment and model systems.