More DNA Sequencing for 2024
Great news for our community! PEI, alongside New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, has been offered an exciting opportunity by Mycota: free DNA sequencing for specimens collected in 2024. This generous offer allows us to broaden our collection window beyond the Mycoblitz events, though those will still feature in our calendar. Last year, we noticed some hesitation around the collection and preservation of specimens. To address this, we're considering a training workshop aimed at boosting confidence and participation in specimen collection. Would this be of interest? Please let me know.
In more exciting news, we've completed the analysis of specimens from last summer's Mycoblitz. Among the 126 submissions, although 10 yielded no sequence and 16 were of low quality, the efforts were far from fruitless. We discovered 5 novel sequences, which are the first of their kind on record, and assigned 4 new provisional names to sequences currently unidentified to species level.
These findings are invaluable; not only do all the sequences enhance our official species list, but notably, 58 of the identified species are new records for PEI. This significantly advances our objective of thoroughly documenting local species diversity.
