Dr. Alison Harrington is the Collection Manager of Fungi, Lichens, and Bryophytes for the University of Michigan’s Herbarium. She talks about how we’re in the early stages of understanding fungi, which are more closely related to animals than plants. Alison also muses on why mushrooms are having a moment in pop culture. Read on…


Can you share the differences between fungi, lichens, and bryophytes?

These three collections get lumped together for historical reasons, but they’re very different organisms. Bryophytes are a group of plants, with mosses as the most widely-known members. Lichens are the “posterchild” of symbiosis, the result of a tight symbiosis between an algal and a fungal partner. And fungi are a whole separate kingdom of life that used to be thought of as plants. We now recognize them as a separate lineage that is more closely related to animals than plants.


Why do you think mushrooms are having a moment in pop culture?

This is a tough one! It seems like mushrooms and fungi are at the convergence of many “hot” themes: local food movements and foraging, whimsical themes in fashion and design, climate change and “green” technologies, etc. So they started popping up in many seemingly-unrelated arenas. One downside of this is that “fungi” has become something of a buzzword. Unfortunately, some profiteers use mushrooms or fungi to sell products or straight-up scams to the well-meaning public.


What excites you in the world of fungi right now?

It might sound a little old-fashioned, but the work I find most exciting is the “basic” work of characterizing, classifying, and describing new species and lineages of fungi, taxonomy and systematics. Because most of fungal biodiversity is still undescribed and we’re still regularly making big changes in the fungal tree of life, this often-underappreciated kind of research is what generates some of the many small building blocks that coalesced into the revolution in mycology of the past few decades. Without this work, it’d be like trying to generate and communicate knowledge in a language where 90% of the dictionary is blank and the definitions keep changing.


Do you have a favorite specimen within the collection?

This is a tough one! I don’t think I could say I have a favorite specimen. Some of our coolest – in this case, also coldest! – specimens are not what I’d think of as traditional, typical herbarium specimens at all. We have an extremely unique collection of living fungal cultures that we store in a liquid nitrogen freezer. These “zoosporic” fungi have spores that swim through water with little flagella, and when they’re stored at liquid nitrogen temps, about -190C, which is -310F! We can revive them and study them decades, or in theory centuries, later. These fungi are impossible to preserve using traditional approaches like drying, so this approach lets us preserve and share a whole other category of fungal biodiversity.


What or who is inspiring you in the world of science?

Right now, I’m inspired by the many non-academic mycologists who are working to characterize and document fungal biodiversity, often with little financial support or formal recognition. These folks might contribute to mycology by documenting fungal species distributions by using tools like iNaturalist, or vouchering that biodiversity by making well-documented dried collections. Or in some cases, generating DNA sequence data from those collections. You could say they’re “citizen scientists” but I think that undersells the work some of these “unaffiliated” or non-academic researchers do. There aren’t that many mycologists. Especially when you think about the scale of the foundational work that remains to be done on the fungal tree of life. So the work these individuals do is invaluable. 


Interested in fungal biodiversity? Support the exploration, documentation and preservation related to the collections of fungi and fungus-like organisms in the Herbarium.