This figure compares basidiospores from P. subaeruginosa collected in SE Queensland (A & C) and Tasmania (B, by Caine B), and of P. cubensis (D). Psilocybe cubensis and P. subaeruginosa are sister taxa (they shared a most recent common ancestor). One might interpret there is not much morphological difference between the populations of P. subaeruginosa separated by a strait and two states.
0 Comments
Recording available here: https://vimeo.com/713129405/2c456a2298
Recommend watching the talk on Clandestine Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) laboratories encountered in Queensland by Dr Tim Currie. The team at Psilopedia have released genomes of 84 cultivated lines of Psilocybe cubensis. How exciting. I did what anyone with a couple of spare genomes of P. cubensis and access to high performance computing would do to determine how the Oz population was related to what people are growing overseas. The Psilopedia genomes are based on DNA extracted from spore prints, which means there are thousands of haplotypes in the assembly. Not great for contiguity but still fantastic for analyses of genetic diversity. I annotated 80 of the Psilopedia genomes and three of our Australian haploid genomes (collected from the Gold Coast). I called SNPs from protein coding regions of sites that were present in every assembly. The SplitsTree figure above is from over 500,000 SNPs and it shows that the Gold Coast population of P. cubensis is completely different to the popular cultivars used by the community. Another interpretation is that there is more genetic diversity in the three haploid genomes from Australia than the entire population of cultivated Golden Teacher (based on branch lengths of genetic distance). Likely, gold tops were introduced to Australia before P. cubensis was widely cultivated. I further looked at the genetic diversity in the Golden Teacher population. This is open to interpretation and would be better with other comparative populations. I interpret this relationship as inbreeding, with little reticulation toward the tip ends and closely related individuals on longer branches. The Index of Association here is a little meaningless at the moment. In obligate outcrossers we expect lower linkage among sites. The Index of Association gets smaller when there is sexual reproduction (increased randomness of allele combinations across the dataset) and higher in clonal populations (the same alleles are always recovered together).
Stay tuned. Next week I will submit another 32 isolates of P. cubensis to sequence genomes from NSW and Queensland and determine whether the population is from one introduction, whether there is outcrossing, the age of introduction and whether there have been any escapes from people cultivating mushrooms. |
Designer Shrooms @ Funky Fungus on 1st July 2023
I started a gig at Funky Fungus as Chief Scientific Officer to make designer shrooms Our research on Psilocybe
|