BioCoder #3

Fun and Fights with Fungi, Part I

Derek Jacoby

This was supposed to have been a nice little article on barcoding mushrooms. There was a simple protocol, and lots of folks in the DIYbio community have done all sorts of barcoding so it should have just gone easily, right? Well, not really. Unlike debugging computer code, where everything is right there to see, when debugging biology there’s a whole lot of inference involved. So even though I don’t have a huge set of exciting mushroom barcoding results to share, I thought sharing my experiences so far might be of some general interest.

This story starts back in October 2013 when BioCoder contributor Noah Most (Chapter 9) was visiting Victoria, BC, Canada. I dragged him and my friend Andy around to a few of the mushroom shows that spring up in the fall in British Columbia. The goal was to take pieces of the mushrooms on the show tables, which had already been identified by experts, and do a genetic identification. This would result in one of three possibilities. First, the mushroom could exist in the barcoding database and agree with the expert identification. Yay, concordance! Second, the mushroom could exist in the database, but be different than what the expert identified. This would also be interesting. Finally, the mushroom could be absent from the barcoding database, meaning we could put it in! That’s the really fun part, when something I’ve discovered turns out to be new and adds to our shared pool of scientific knowledge.

So where’s ...