Tag: Matt Kasson

Meet A Special Fungi That Help Plants Grow On Former Mining Land

Thousands of people have found themselves working from home during the coronavirus pandemic. Of course, essential workers don’t have that luxury. But that’s not the only type of work that can’t be done from home.

 

Scientists across the country have struggled to maintain access to their research, including researchers who take care of living collections — those libraries of living things, usually housed at academic institutions, and used for study or preservation. 

 

West Virginia University is home to an important collection of living fungi. These are especially useful in West Virginia, because they can help plants grow on former mining sites.

 

“We spend a lot of time restoring lands that have been used for mining. And these fungi help plants colonize those lands,” said Matt Kasson, associate professor of plant pathology at WVU and the scientist who oversees this collection.

 

Kasson said these fungi help restore former mine lands.

 

“These lands are often depleted of nutrients,” he said. “Plants don’t often find it a hospitable environment to grow in. Through this partnership with these fungi, the site’s become more hospitable because these fungi are able to secure nutrients that plants otherwise themselves couldn’t extract.”

 

Kasson and his lab grow more than 900 individual strains of these fungi called INVAM, which, according to WVU, is the world’s largest collection of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi — these are fungi that have formed an intimate, beneficial partnership with plant roots.

 

For the fungi to flourish, each individual strain must be partnered with a plant host, and maintained in a greenhouse for several months to a year. WVU’s space can only culture about 250 to 300 strains at a time, and they must be watered daily.

 

But we’re also in a public health pandemic, which has made it harder for scientists like Kasson to meet the needs of these fungi.

 

He and his team had to work with WVU to defend their status as essential workers. They also had to figure out how to get personal protective equipment, decrease the number of people in the lab, and alter their travel routes within the building in order to continue doing their work.

 

They also saw a huge decline in orders from potential buyers, like other academic institutions, organizations and entities that purchase the fungi to use them.

 

“We have shut down that aspect of the collection since March. So anyone who wanted to purchase strains have not been able to so,” he said. “We’re not sure when we’re going to start that back up.”

 

As of last week, though, Kasson and his team have been able to start fulfilling orders again after a decline by 70 percent compared to this time last year.

 

Kasson said they weren’t able to fulfill orders until now, because they couldn’t begin new cultures. But he also said they didn’t see many orders come in as most institutions that would want to purchase these fungi have been closed due to the pandemic.

 

But these fungi also appear naturally in nature, so why is it important to keep them alive in labs like WVU’s? Kasson said it’s to ensure diversity, and because of the uncertainty caused by climate change.

 

“As we deal with the impacts of climate change, and we lose land that is more suitable for growing crops, and we have to move towards less suitable lands, these fungi can make a real difference,” he said.

 

As we continue to face the coronavirus pandemic as a state, nation and globe, Kasson said it’s important for scientists to be able to access their research, as we never know where the next big discovery will come from. 

 

“With regard to medicine, right now we’re in a pandemic, and a lot of people are working on vaccines, and there’s a lot of great scientists leveraging a lot of collections and things like that. And I think it’s really important to know that there’s a lot of potential in these collections that have yet to come to the surface, and that’s one of the reasons we need to maintain them.”

A New Disease Strikes Oak Trees in W.Va.

Last fall, Danielle Martin, a forest pathologist for the U.S. Forest Service in Morgantown, and her colleagues noticed something different about the oak trees in Seneca State Forest. The trees secreted an amber-colored sap, and bore cankers – which look like canker sores – underneath their bark. 

“We saw a vertical crack with perhaps some weeping, a bleeding appearance – like an amber bleeding – and that’s when we’d remove the bark and look for cankers,” Martin said. 

Martin worked with Matt Kasson, an assistant professor of forest pathology at West Virginia University, and his graduate students to diagnose those trees with diplodia corticola. Diplodia corticola is an aggressive disease that limits the ability of oak trees to access essential nutrients and water, ultimately killing them. It was first reported in Europe, and has since emerged in Florida, California, Massachusetts and Maine. This is the first time that it’s been found in oak trees in West Virginia. 

While the timber industry is aware of the new disease, they’re not concerned just yet. Kasson says West Virginia residents should be concerned because as oak trees weaken, they are more likely to fall and hurt people – especially in recreational areas. 

Credit Jesse Wright / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Matt Kasson, an assistant professor of forest pathology at WVU, examines an oak tree at Coopers Rock State Forest in Morgantown.

“Look at that tree! You can see that it’s dead. That tree is completely dead,” Kasson said, pointing at a tree near a playground at Coopers Rock State Forest in Morgantown. “That tree has been in a state of decline for a number of years, and it poses a great risk, especially to the playground area.” 

Tree diseases aren’t new to West Virginia. In the early 1900s, chestnut blight wiped out billions of chestnut trees in the United States, including those in Appalachia. Hemlocks and ash trees are also battling illnesses. In fact, Martin says, these tree diseases coupled with mass logging may have helped diplodia get its start in southern West Virginia.

“The majority of the Appalachian forests were cut about 100 years ago, so all of our trees are about the same age,” she said. “So they’re all kind of equally susceptible in a way to these pathogens. If something affects them, it could potentially affect all of them.”

Fortunately, Martin isn’t concerned about diplodia wiping out oak trees on a large scale in the area. She does think the disease will weaken the trees as a whole, making them more vulnerable to stressors like drought or insect infestations or flooding that could serve as the final blow to the tree’s health. Kasson agreed. 

“I think us detecting this diplodia canker on oak is only the beginning. I think with all this flooding that we’ve had this past summer, we will see a sharp rise in the amount of predisposition and subsequently in the rise of fungal infections in oaks and in other tree species in that part of the state,” he said. 

The two will look into what is causing the outbreak in West Virginia and what could be used to cure it, in hopes that they can find an end to what seems to be the beginning of a new tree disease outbreak. 

Exit mobile version