Genomics of Luminescence in Mycena Mushrooms

ended

Sailors called it “burning of the sea”, Shakespeare described it as “pale fire” and Aristotle named it “cold light”. The glimmer they witnessed was light emitted by living organisms or bioluminescence. While it represents one of the most striking examples of convergent evolution across the tree of life, in Fungi it has a single origin in the Agaricales order, Basidiomycota. In particular, Mycena, a large genus of mushroom-forming fungi, includes most of known bioluminescent species together with hundreds of species that lost the ability to emit light. In GLiMMer, I will study the evolution of fungal bioluminescence and test the hypothesis that multiple, lineage-specific mechanisms led to the convergent loss of this trait, providing clues for its ecological relevance. To date, Mycena lacks a robust phylogenetic framework and is heavily under sampled. Fungarium collections, such as the one at Naturalis, preserved thousands of Mycena specimens over the past centuries. Thanks to new high-throughput sequencing methods these collections are being transformed in genomics resources, bridging taxonomy and evolution. In GLiMMer, my expertise in fungal genomics will serve to develop a genome-based classification of Mycena, that combines contemporary and museum specimens. I will generate assemblies of 100 representative species using short-read sequencing. Next, I will extract phylogenetically informative loci to design a target sequence capture method for recalcitrant museum specimens for the first time in mushrooms. Then, I will use the new classification to select reference species and obtain chromosomal-level assemblies using long-read sequencing. Finally, with genome-wide synteny analyses I will investigate the evolutionary circumstances that led to the birth and death of bioluminescence in Fungi. By integrating taxonomy, genomics and evolution, my project will create a paradigm shift in our knowledge on fungal biodiversity and ultimately contribute to its conservation.