Measuring soil fungi diversity with Dr. Carrie Hauxwell and Sean Martin

Back in December 2021, during two Bushtime events, Dr. Carrie Hauxwell from QUT and her research assistant Sean Martin, engaged citizen scientists in some lab work to isolate soil fungi species into culture. They are studying pasture dieback and part of this research is its correlation with soil fungi diversity.

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Carrie first gave a fascinating presentation on the topic of microbial symbiosis and then we ventured out to the field to collect some soil samples from three transacts of 15m length to investigate fungal diversity in soil from around an old growth fig tree extending to soil covered by grass.

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Once soil samples were collected, soil moisture and ground cover data recorded, we ventured back to the Citizen Science Lab venue to cultivate some fungi found in the samples.

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The samples were diluted, shaken and a 100ml of the liquid layer was transferred using electric pipettes into Petri dishes contain a selective growth medium to support fungal growth.

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Citizen scientists learnt some basic principles and were introduced to using the equipment involved in microbiology lab work.

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Once the plates were incubated for 1-2 weeks at 24 degrees C, and developed some fungal growth, Carrie selected colonies of interest and isolated these into pure culture resulting in 60 isolates.

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Sean extracted and sequenced the DNA from these isolates providing us with the data and produced a graph to show the changes in fungal diversity across the transects.

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Diversity of fungi Screen Shot 2022-10-18 at 12.34.23 pm.png

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Fungal diversity strongly correlated with plant diversity and nine genera of soil fungi grew from the soil samples, four of these have not been previously described and with further work might prove to be newly described species. These are highlighted in blue in the below dataset.

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