Thank you to Kelly from BioPlatforms Australia, who has helped support sequencing of 100 genomes of Psilocybe subaeruginosa collected in 2022. Thank you also to the collectors of P. subaeruginosa: Caine B (and helpers), Snu, Jan T, Dave H (and team from Kosciuszko), Tim S, and anyone who has anonymously sent prints. Our project is just over one year in, with quite a lot of data considering there has been no financial support (until BioPlatforms stepped in). There are over 100 haploid cultures of Psilocybe lodged in the herbarium, and we will have sequenced 140 genomes in less than 18 months. This is an effort from the community interested in Psilocybe, I'm just the bloke at the end of the chain.
The stories on mating, biodiversity, introduction of P. cubensis, and variation at the psilocybin locus are unfolding nicely. I probably won't have finished everything before my contract finishes in November, but I'll keep working on genetics of magic mushrooms as long as I have a computer, and all these data will be made public for the community to blaze ahead. Pictured below, preparation of the 100 cultures for sequencing. Get in touch if you would like to make use of the data, otherwise they'll be public in 2 years maximum (from when I get the raw data).
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Here are some new analyses with a longer-term aim to determine how long gold tops have been in Australia. Originally, in the network analyses from past posts, it appeared that populations of gold tops were structured by geography, e.g. mushrooms from Mareeba would not reproduce with mushrooms from Lismore. On the road to determine the effective population size of Psilocybe cubensis in Australia, it now looks like there is some admixture (sexual reproduction among populations). The below figure is a journey to determine how we should treat the populations of P. cubensis in Australia. I tested how many groups best fit the data (which is 'K' in the figure). The figure depicts how populations across Queensland and NSW would look if treated as 2–6 different groups. I settled on 6 as the number of groups in the sequenced populations. If we added new locations, no doubt we would see more geographic structure. The curious result is that populations from Cairns, Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast all group together. They are genetically similar. This could mean that manure has been moved from southeast Queensland to northern Queensland (or vice versa). Though it is difficult to know for sure. It's also interesting that different mushrooms from the Sunshine Coast are either related to those in Cairns, or form their own segregated population.
Leave it with me, but if you have ideas on why these three locations may not be structured by geography, let's explore them together :). Thanks again to the legends who collected the mushrooms for these analyses! |
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
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