#funghi #carbonCycleFungi Are Capturing More Carbon Than We Thought | Discover Magazinehttps://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/fungi-are-capturing-more-carbon-than-we-thoughtScientists had long thought it simply evaporated into the atmosphere. But that didn’t sit right with Davinia Salvachúa Rodríguez, a microbiologist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. After 10 years of studying white-rot fungi, she demonstrated that it eats the carbon in lignin to fuel its growth, according to a March study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Rodríguez’s discovery flags white-rot fungi as a key player in sequestering lignin-derived carbon in soil.
Similarly, Stanford University microbiologist Anne Dekas published a study in June in PNAS showing that parasitic fungi that live on tiny algae in oceans and lakes remove some of the carbon inside the algae, which might otherwise reenter the atmosphere.
Conventional wisdom had maintained that all of the carbon inside the algae remained in a microbial feedback loop near the water’s surface, where microbes consumed the green plants and then released the C02. But Dekas and colleagues showed instead that the fungi siphon off up to 20 percent of the algae’s carbon. Then — because the fungi outsize the microbes in the feedback loop — the fungi become a more likely meal for larger species, which remove them from the loop. As the carbon makes its way up the food chain, it may eventually sink to the ocean floor, which also sequesters carbon, when the top species dies.