Fact Check Your Feed, Climate And Fungi, Cells Solve A Maze. September 4, 2020, Part 2
Science Friday
Science Friday and WNYC Studios
4.4 ⢠6.3K Ratings
đď¸ 4 September 2020
âąď¸ 47 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. One of the most extensive networks for sharing information and moving around essential goods is hidden from us. Yeah, it's right below our feet. You might have heard of it. It's the wood wide web. See what I did there? I'm talking about the fungal networks that connect trees and plants to one another. Scientists are starting to untangle what these fungal connections look like |
| 0:23.4 | and how fungi respond and are affected by climate change. |
| 0:27.8 | And what that means for the entire forest ecosystem. |
| 0:31.0 | This is something I really want to talk about with my next guest. |
| 0:34.4 | He's here to walk us through this mycological maze. |
| 0:40.2 | Christopher Fernandez is a postdoctoral associate in plant and microbial biology, University of Minnesota and Minneapolis. They call it the |
| 0:46.8 | you over there, right? Chris? That's right. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me, Ira. |
| 0:51.8 | Even though we can't see it, fungi play an important role, |
| 0:54.7 | right, when it comes to trees and plant ecosystems. Can you take us through a bit of fungi 101? What a |
| 1:00.8 | fungi fungi provide for plants? Absolutely, yeah. So the organisms that I study are called |
| 1:07.0 | micro-rizo fungi. So these are fungi that are really important for the plant nutrition. |
| 1:12.7 | Basically, these fungi colonize the finest roots of plants and provide access to nutrients that |
| 1:19.5 | would otherwise be unavailable for direct plant uptake. So plant productivity is directly dependent |
| 1:25.2 | on these kinds of associations. And so about 90% we're saying these days of plant species actually have one of these types of microisal associations. |
| 1:37.9 | So there are two basic types of microisal associations are buscular microasal fungi, which are really common in grassland-type |
| 1:45.7 | ecosystems and prairies and tropical forests. And then there are ectomicorazal fungi, which are |
| 1:51.9 | really important in temperate and boreal forests. And those are the organisms that I work with. |
| 1:57.3 | Which ones do we see on our lawns and in the backyards on trees? |
| 2:01.4 | Yeah, so it would depend. |
| 2:02.9 | If it's a mushroom forming fungus, then it is an ectomycorrhizal fungus. |
| 2:08.2 | Or it could be a satirphic fungus that just is decaying soil organic matter. |
| 2:13.0 | There are also free-living fungi? |
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