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!
2 Comments
Tristan
4/4/2023 02:50:44 am
Perhaps it is directly related with the movement of cattle in Australia? Or to do with specific beef or dairy cattle populations and their movement.
Reply
Alistair
4/4/2023 03:18:15 pm
Hi Tristan,
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
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
|