For all the picnics, festivals, and fun activities, it can be easy to forget that the Garden is also a place of rigorous research and scholarship. What, after all, does the “B” stand for in “NYBG”? Come find out this weekend at our Annual Science Open House! The Garden’s top science staff will be leading expert tours that go behind the scenes of one of the country’s premier plant research entities.
Enjoy a guided tour of the Steere Herbarium, the largest herbarium in the Western Hemisphere—and among the four largest in the world—with 7.3 million preserved plant specimens! Begin a collection of your own with our hands-on collecting demos, including fungi and plant collecting demonstrations from the inimitable Roy Halling and Donald McClelland, respectively. Meet the scientists studying DNA and genomes in a tour of the state-of-the-art Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory. You’ll look at the Garden grounds and all of nature in a new light! Bring the family and encourage a love of science in your little ones.
Read on for a comprehensive run-down of our Science Open House programming, as well as the schedule of our regular Groundbreakers activities.
Smith & Thiers described this mushroom, Boletus hortonii, honorifically for Charles Horton Peck, former New York State Botanist, who recognized the mushroom under a different name. It is a porcini in a very, very broad sense. I took the picture last week when it was fruiting at the Garden. It is widespread in the Northeast, though uncommon.
Boletus hortonii (photo by Roy Halling)
Roy E. Halling, PhD is Curator of Mycology at the Institute of Systematic Botany at The New York Botanical Garden.
Cranberries are grown in sunken bogs that can be flooded to harvest the fruit. (photo by Vinson Doyle)
Plants and fungi have an intimate relationship. Some fungi, like mycorrhizal fungi which help a plant’s roots use soil resources more efficiently, are beneficial to plants, while others, like powdery mildew on squash leaves, are obviously harmful. However there are many fungi that exist somewhere on the continuum between friend and foe. To further complicate the matter, whether an individual fungus is beneficial, neutral, or antagonistic may change over time such that apparently harmless fungi can become pathogenic.
Cranberries infected with pathogenic fungi. Many different species of fungi are responsible for causing cranberry fruit-rot, but Colletotrichum is one of the most prevalent in cultivated cranberries. (photo by Vinson Doyle)
Studying these fungi can be difficult; they do not always make their presence obvious. Imagine tracking an elephant through the forests of East Africa to understand what it eats, where it travels, and how it selects a mate. Now, imagine tracking an individual you can’t see in the wild, or if you can see it, you can’t tell it apart from its siblings. Tracking these wild fungi would have been impossible a decade ago, but with the advances being made in modern genetic methods both here at The New York Botanical Garden and around the world, we are finally able to address the big questions surrounding these tiny organisms.
My work focuses on understanding the genetic diversity of a single fungal species, Colletotrichum gloeosporioides. C. gloeosporioides is a sneaky fungus that is capable of shifting its place on the continuum between harmless and pathogenic to cranberry. The main focus of my research involves understanding how the spores of C. gloeosporioides are dispersed, what other plants it is associated with, and how it reproduces. I hope that a fuller understanding of this fungus will help cranberry growers formulate effective management plans.
But before we can find answers we have to find the fungus.
Flowering cranberries. While these plants are healthy, there are fungi living under the surface of the plant tissue. (photo by Vinson Doyle)A pure isolate of Colletotrichum growing on agar that was isolated from cranberry. Ascospores produced in the laboratory by a Colletotrichum species isolated from cranberry. (photo by Vinson Doyle)
My field work begins in the cultivated and wild cranberry bogs of North America in the hope that by finding the plant, we will find the fungus. In some cases, it is readily obvious that the plants have been infected by a pathogenic fungus. However, we frequently can’t determine which fungus has infected them, so we collect fruits, stems, and leaves and bring them back to the lab for further study. In other cases, we find plants that look perfectly healthy, but we suspect there are fungi lurking beneath the surface. So we take the material back to the Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory for more research. The hunt continues!
In order to study plant-associated fungi, that is, fungi that live within a plant such as C. gloeosporioides does, we must first coax the fungi out of the plant. To do this we place the plant pieces on a suitable growth medium that encourages the fungus to emerge from the plant and to populate the medium; in this way we are able to isolate the fungus and study it more carefully. Inevitably, many different species of fungi emerge onto the growth medium, which means we must isolate and identify each one.
A high elevation cranberry bog in the Monogahela National Forest in West Virginia. Cranberries are in flower along the banks of the stream (photo by Vinson Doyle)
Once we have isolated all the individual fungal strains, we use methods similar to those used in forensics to identify each one. In the Cullman Lab, we use DNA markers that allow us to identify each individual fungal strain within a single species in the same way that forensics specialists use DNA markers to establish whether an individual was at the scene of a crime.
Modern genetic methods have helped us determine that fungal strains are likely moving undetected (disguising themselves as harmless fungi) inside cranberry vines used to establish new farms in disparate regions before revealing themselves as harmful pathogens. This finding will hopefully allow researchers and farmers in the future to better understand the sources of disease epidemics. This knowledge should help farmers implement preventative measures and may lead to new methods for establishing cranberry bogs.
Nick Leshi is Associate Director of Public Relations and Electronic Media.
When I talk about The New York Botanical Garden, one phrase I tend to repeat over and over is: “No matter what the weather is like outside, there is always something to see and do here, both indoors and out.” In addition to the beauty of the Garden’s grounds and living collections in every season, there are also great indoor attractions. One of my absolute favorites is located on the fourth floor of the Library building—the permanent exhibition Plants and Fungi: Ten Current Research Stories.
The exhibition, housed in the grand Britton Science Rotunda and Gallery, allows visitors to explore the important research being conducted by Botanical Garden scientists here in the Bronx and around the world. Massive mural images of the Garden’s founders, Nathaniel Lord Britton and Elizabeth Knight Britton, overlook a map showing the corners of the world where our scientists have traveled for field research to solve some the mysteries of nature and to better understand the role of plants and fungi in our lives, part of the Garden’s overall mission as an advocate for the plant kingdom.
The rotunda features multiple displays illustrating the “William C. Steere Tradition,” with information on mosses, lichen, and three panels on mushrooms and berries. It educates the public on the legacy and influence of the man for whom the adjacent William and Lynda Steere Herbarium is named and where over 7 million plant and fungi specimens are archived. Computer terminals in the Gallery allow visitors to access the online specimen catalog from the C.V. Starr Virtual Herbarium.
Other computer stations in the exhibition provide audio-video presentations explaining Garden scientists’ research on rice, cycads, brazil nuts, squashes, ferns, and vanilla orchids. Visitors young and old can see how modern tools such as DNA fingerprinting as well as classic techniques of plant exploration are used, and how scientists are studying vital topics like genetic diversity in rice and a nerve toxin in cycads that may provide insight into neurological diseases.
You can meet some of the scientists in person and hear them discuss their research as part of the 2009 Gallery Talks series Around the World with Garden Scientists in the Britton Science Rotunda and Gallery. Robbin Moran, Ph.D., kicks off the series this Saturday, January 24, at 1 p.m. with his presentation “The Fascinating World of Ferns” and provides a behind-the-scenes tour of the Herbarium.
Carol Capobianco is Editorial Content Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.
With the recent wet weather you may have noticed that mushrooms are, well, mushrooming—in moist areas of your garden, on a pile of mulch, in a nearby woodland.
Here at the Botanical Garden, from the end of June to the first frost you may see Dr. Roy Halling, Curator of Mycology, walking about the grounds after a significant rainfall in search of his favorite subject. He has dedicated his life’s work to studying mushrooms. “I want to know what they are, where they grow, and how they are related to each other.”
The casual observer can see about 40 to 50 different types of mushrooms at the Garden over the course of the season. Roy’s top three spots are Twin Lakes, the bottom of Azalea Way, and the Arthur and Janet Ross Conifer Arboretum. At the base of pines and oaks are the best places to look because of the symbiotic relationship between the roots of these trees and mushrooms.
Although, after almost 25 years on staff at the Garden, he knows where to look, he’s not always certain what he’ll find. “I search near Twin Lakes and used to find mushrooms there. The oak tree is still there, but there are different mushrooms now. The others either aren’t there or they’ve moved.”
Moved? Yes, mushrooms will travel—or actually not return and appear elsewhere—according to their nutrient needs.
Roy travels, too. He’s been to many parts of the world and has co-authored a guide to mushrooms of Costa Rica, but his specialty has been researching the fungi (the group to which mushrooms belong) of Australia and Southeast Asia. His current project, with a grant from the National Geographic Society, is to explore for and document the mushrooms on the world’s largest sand island, Fraser Island, north of Brisbane. Roy has found that fungi provide the nutrients for the survival of the rain forest that otherwise implausibly exists on this island.
Learn more about Roy and his work with mushrooms after the jump.
For all the picnics, festivals, and fun activities, it can be easy to forget that the Garden is also a place of rigorous research and scholarship. What, after all, does the “B” stand for in “NYBG”? Come find out this weekend at our Annual Science Open House! The Garden’s top science staff will be leading expert tours that go behind the scenes of one of the country’s premier plant research entities.
