Sanders’ Swiss workplace is immaculately clean, and the room where the fungi are taken out for study is scrupulously sterile. Every night, all night, UV lights shine a microbe-killing glare. They destroy anything that could infect his cultures of mycorrhizal fungi.
Over the course of Sanders’ 26-year career, he’s made a number of key discoveries about fungi genetics and reproduction. He conducted early research that demonstrated that the greater the diversity of mycorrhizal fungi in a given ecosystem, the greater the diversity of plants. And in 2008, as he delved into genetics, he proved that they don’t just reproduce by cloning—they actually exchange genetic material, both in the lab and in the field.
This gave him an idea. If the microbes created offspring that were different from one another, Sanders thought, “you have a good chance that some will be more effective on plant growth than others.” So he came up with a plan: Take different fungi, breed them, see if any help plants out more than others. In other words, take the approach to farming that breeders have used for thousands of years and use it on fungi.
This is where Sanders runs into occasional criticism from some of his microbe-studying colleagues, who say that nature has already bred all the best variety of microbes. “If you use the argument from these researchers,” he counters, “then no one would have produced any plants through plant breeding, because they would have said, ‘Well, nature’s already made the best plants, and we can’t make any more that are any better than what nature has made.’ Now, of course, we know from a few thousand years of agriculture that we can make plants better by crossing them, and we can get varieties that produce bigger yields than that which we see in natural-occurring varieties of those plants in nature.” Without similar human intervention, the whole system of microbial support might not be optimally tweaked to match.
To test out his idea, Sanders partnered with a colleague in Switzerland who was studying the genetics of the fungi-rice relationship, and who already had conducted research in a university greenhouse set up for rice cultivation. Sanders grew the fungi and allowed them to exchange genetic material and reproduce, creating genetically distinct offspring. Then, he colonized rice with these distinct lines. Sanders used rice as a matter of convenience due to his colleague’s experience, but he also knew that rice, as farmed today, tends to actually grow more poorly when inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi, making it a good test bed. He was stunned when one of the lines produced a five-fold increase in growth over the other fungal lines. “To see such a huge growth increase was very, very surprising,” he says. The greenhouse was an artificial environment, and the microbe-enhanced soil was compared to sterile soil. It in no way mimicked nature. But it proved a point.
Around that time, Sanders got back in touch with Alia Rodriguez, an agronomist in Colombia who also had expertise in mycorrhizal fungi. They had originally met when he was one of her PhD examiners in England. He was desperate to visit Colombia and see its amazing animal and plant biodiversity for himself, so they decided to try to find a research project together.
- More Here
Over the course of Sanders’ 26-year career, he’s made a number of key discoveries about fungi genetics and reproduction. He conducted early research that demonstrated that the greater the diversity of mycorrhizal fungi in a given ecosystem, the greater the diversity of plants. And in 2008, as he delved into genetics, he proved that they don’t just reproduce by cloning—they actually exchange genetic material, both in the lab and in the field.
This gave him an idea. If the microbes created offspring that were different from one another, Sanders thought, “you have a good chance that some will be more effective on plant growth than others.” So he came up with a plan: Take different fungi, breed them, see if any help plants out more than others. In other words, take the approach to farming that breeders have used for thousands of years and use it on fungi.
This is where Sanders runs into occasional criticism from some of his microbe-studying colleagues, who say that nature has already bred all the best variety of microbes. “If you use the argument from these researchers,” he counters, “then no one would have produced any plants through plant breeding, because they would have said, ‘Well, nature’s already made the best plants, and we can’t make any more that are any better than what nature has made.’ Now, of course, we know from a few thousand years of agriculture that we can make plants better by crossing them, and we can get varieties that produce bigger yields than that which we see in natural-occurring varieties of those plants in nature.” Without similar human intervention, the whole system of microbial support might not be optimally tweaked to match.
To test out his idea, Sanders partnered with a colleague in Switzerland who was studying the genetics of the fungi-rice relationship, and who already had conducted research in a university greenhouse set up for rice cultivation. Sanders grew the fungi and allowed them to exchange genetic material and reproduce, creating genetically distinct offspring. Then, he colonized rice with these distinct lines. Sanders used rice as a matter of convenience due to his colleague’s experience, but he also knew that rice, as farmed today, tends to actually grow more poorly when inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi, making it a good test bed. He was stunned when one of the lines produced a five-fold increase in growth over the other fungal lines. “To see such a huge growth increase was very, very surprising,” he says. The greenhouse was an artificial environment, and the microbe-enhanced soil was compared to sterile soil. It in no way mimicked nature. But it proved a point.
Around that time, Sanders got back in touch with Alia Rodriguez, an agronomist in Colombia who also had expertise in mycorrhizal fungi. They had originally met when he was one of her PhD examiners in England. He was desperate to visit Colombia and see its amazing animal and plant biodiversity for himself, so they decided to try to find a research project together.
- More Here
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