From Our Special Correspondent
GUWAHATI: Mushrooms are glowing at night, across the bamboo forests of Meghalaya!
An Indo-Chinese team consisting of a group of scientists from the Balipara Foundation in Sonitpur district of Assam and Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences has discovered a new mushroom species in West Jaintia Hills after two years of a sustained fungi expedition.
The team has named the new bioluminescent mushroom, Roridomyces phyllostachydis, while locals call the species, “electric mushroom”.
An article on this new bioluminescent mushroom was published in Phytotaxa, a scientific journal, on Friday.
The foray was assisted by a world famous fungi photographer, Steve Axford and a famous videographer, Catherine Marciniak.
“Based on information from locals about a mushroom that glows at night, we travelled to West Jaintia Hills on August 23, 2018. A local person guided us to a bamboo forest, and a minute after we switched off our torches, we were amazed to see the mushrooms glowing inside bamboo sticks,” a member of the Balipara Foundation research team said.
“We picked up some dead bamboo sticks and observed them closely. The stalks (stipeses) of the tiny mushrooms on the bamboo were glowing in green. By looking at the morphology of the mushroom we identified it as Mycena or Roridomyces,” he said.
During the assessment, the Balipara Foundation documented over 600 fungal varieties.
“We sequenced the ITS gene (a part DNA sequence used to identify fungi) of the mushroom to check which genus it belongs to, and the sequence results showed the mushroom belongs to Roridomyces, Samantha Karunarathna, a lead mycologist from the Kunming Institute of Botany, said.
“Among the 12 well-accepted species, Roridomyces irritans, Roridomyces lamprosporus, Roridomyces pruinosoviscidus, Roridomyces roridus and Roridomyces sublucens are known to be bioluminescent,” Karunarathna said.
“The total number has risen to 13 with our new Roridomyces species, which was named Roridomyces phyllostachydis. The species name refers to the host bamboo tree, Phyllostachys, from where the mushroom was first collected,” the mycologist added.
Researches on bioluminescent fungi have gained attention due to their application in medical research, agricultural fields, environmental biosensors, biochemistry, photochemistry, evolution and taxonomic research.
Several hypotheses suggest that the luminescent properties of the fungi offer several advantages over other fungi with regard to the spore dispersal mechanism by attracting insects, and protecting themselves from frugivorous animals.