Sequences from metabarcoding data: A 'new' hallucinogenic species occurs in the Northern Territory1/18/2022 Yesterday I guest lectured in Liz Aitken's Fungal Biology class at UQ (BIOL3210). Fun on a bun. One student asked a question along the lines of 'are gold tops only present in cow farms?' I answered that they are potentially everywhere but need certain conditions to fruit, this is based on their ability to distribute spores and that saprotrophic fungi could form hyphae wherever there is a source of carbohydrates they can access. How to test this question a bit more? I jumped on to Bioplatforms Australia and downloaded the curated fungal ITS database, which includes all ITS sequences (~250 base pairs) from sampling sites around Australia (link to the data here). I expected that P. cubensis would occur in many sampled environments, even if there were no cows around. How wrong I was. There are 3,412 BASE sample sites. Many of the fungi identified as Psilocybe in their dataset were Deconica, and when these are removed, species of Psilocybe occur at 17 of those sites (<0.5% of sampled sites!). Here's a link to a pdf of the above figure if you want more resolution.
One of the most exciting things to me is the putative hallucinogenic species of Psilocybe in the Northern Territory, recorded in Kakadu and Litchfield National Parks. These sequences, which had just under 100 repeats in the dataset, formed a monophyletic group sister to the Psilocybe yungensis clade, and not closely related to anything else. Potentially a candidate for a new taxon (if species of Psilocybe have not been described from the NT), and potentially evidence that hallucinogenic species of mushroom occur in Kakadu NP. To all those reading in the NT, why not head to Litchfield NP for the day next time you've had some rain :). Send me some spores and we can describe it if it's a new taxon. I've added the location and number of reads to the BASE sequence data. You'll notice there are no sequences of P. cubensis or P. semilanceata in the BASE data, which I find surprising for two 'weedy' taxa in Australia. Plenty of P. subaeruginosa s. lat., with some of the those sequences near-identical to P. weraroa (which is not very informative in this complex). More sequences and locations than I had expected for the P. papuana clade. What does this mean? Psilocybe are present, whether as spores or mycelium, at the sample sites. The sampling method of BASE may have biased whether Psilocybe was sequenced, which may explain the relatively few sites that had Psilocybe present. And lastly, in answer to the question from mycology yesterday, I'll change my answer to maybe P. cubensis is less ubiquitous than I thought :)
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