The project being coordinated by Mr Pisabarro focuses on a dozen fungi and has a very concrete objective: “We know what genes there are in each fungus, but we do not know how they use them. We asked ourselves how the various fungi employed the arms they have in order to degrade wood and we wanted to do the same in a comparative manner; i.e. subject the fungi to the same conditions in order to see what genes are being expressed as a function of the situation in which they find themselves. This will enable us to find out what strategies the various fungi are really using to degrade the wood”. This technique is known as comparative transcriptomics and enables quantifying and comparing the levels of expression of the genes of an organism.
Read more of the news release from Spain’s Public University of Navarre on BasqueResearch.