A COMPLEX WEB OF LIFE: BACTERIAL-FUNGAL INTERACTIONS
honours student Shivagami Shamugam
In his book Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake imagines the soil as a “horizonless external gut – digestion and salvage everywhere, with flocks of bacteria surfing waves of electrical charge... like the Wild West with all those bandits, brigands, loners, crap shooters… and the seething intimate contact on all sides by fungal hyphae.”
Getting up close and personal to the community of biota within compost reveals a hustle and bustle that could rival Tokyo central station at peak hour. Mushroom compost thrums with life and activity.
The fermented and pasteurised substrates that support mushrooms are home to countless microorganisms, interacting with each other in a series of physiological and biochemical reactions to create ideal growing conditions for the Agaricus mycelia.
Understanding these bacterial interactions in mushroom compost will likely underpin future developments in the industry as it searches for more sustainable sources of substrates.
University of Sydney honours student Shivagami Shamugam has been investigating the status of current research, and opportunities to exploit bacterial interactions, as part of a levy-supported research project with Dr Michael Kertesz. Her review has been accepted (with minor changes) for publication in the Journal of Applied Microbiology – a significant achievement for an honours student. The following attempts to summarise this review.
