In February, 2024, SPUN and JR Biotek co-hosted the African Mycorrhizal Mapping and Metagenomics Workshop in Kumasi, Ghana in partnership with Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) and CSIR - Crops Research Institute. The workshop was co-led by Dr. Bethan Manley, who sat down with workshop participant Dr. Jacob Ulzen of University of Ghana to talk about his experience.

In the race to map underground fungi before they are gone, it is imperative that we enlist the best mycorrhizal researchers from everywhere in the world, and we found we had a gap in the amount of research coming out of the Global South. In an effort to remedy this, we created the Underground Explorers program to support mycorrhizal researchers from the Global South, and underfunded countries.

Most mycorrhizal fungi live their entire lives underground – many of them don’t even make mushrooms, the fruiting bodies of fungi that pop up above the soil level. The hidden nature of these organisms can make studying them particularly challenging. For organisms like plants and animals, scientists can gather observational data, counting and recording or tagging study subjects. When it comes to belowground fungi and microbes, these surveys become more complicated.

We've known for quite some time that carbon flows from plants into mycorrhizal fungi. It’s one of the central pieces to this type of plant-fungal symbiosis. But until now, we haven't had a good global estimate of how much that flow of carbon is. With this review, our goal was to synthesize all the data currently out there to try and better understand this overlooked component of the carbon cycle.