Project description
Tapping museum collections to uncover novel lichen-forming fungi species quickly and efficiently
Lichen-forming fungi play critical roles in the world’s ecosystems, and account for nearly one fifth of all fungal species. However, lichen-forming fungi have not been as well studied as other forms, so these estimates are expected to be quite low relative to the actual number of species. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the FRAME project will harness museomics, an emerging field that studies the genomic data of organisms available only in museum collections, to generate informative genomic sequences efficiently and at low cost and integrate essential organisms into our global biodiversity inventory.
Objective
With current projections of fungal diversity estimated at 2.2 to 3.8 million species, only 3-5% of those species are currently accepted. Within this group, lichen-forming fungi comprise c. 17% of known fungal diversity, playing fundamental roles in the world ecosystems. However, considering that lichens are poorly studied, compared for example to angiosperms, global lichen diversity is widely underestimated, and this is further confounded by the fact that genetic material is sometimes the only way to uncover diversity hidden beneath their simple morphological structures. As researchers race to uncover such cryptic diversity, one resource ripe for exploitation is existing natural history museums, where thousands of lichen specimens have been preserved ranging from recent to centuries-old collections. FRAME seeks to use such existing resources to address this issue with the use of museomics, a novel approach to generate informative genomic sequences from historical collections, providing a cost-effective, efficient, and laborsaving technique to integrate essential organisms into our global biodiversity inventory. This project will not only determine the efficacy of using museomics on fungal collections, but will also provide novel insights into the evolutionary history of a charismatic lineage of lobarioid lichens whose diversity has been continually reclassified in the past decade primarily due to standard genetic analyses. While this project will involve an extensive and robust reclassification of lobarioid lichens as a whole, it will also use New Caledonia as a case study to determine both the efficacy of combining museomics with targeted fieldwork to provide biodiversity estimates, while also elucidating the factors that have led to insular lichen diversification. Thus, through FRAME, a novel and cutting-edge integration of relevant museum collections with modern bioinformatic techniques will be generated, providing an adaptable framework for use in other taxa.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
0313 Oslo
Norway