Researcher Alexander Bradshaw and team uncover a new fungi species
A new species of psychoactive fungi has been described from Africa by a team that includes Alexander Bradshaw, a post-doctoral researcher in Clark’s Biology Department, working in the lab with professors David Hibbett and Javier Tabima Restrepo.
The species, which has been named Psilocybe ochraceocentrata, is a close relative to Psilocybe cubensis, the most well-known species of psychoactive fungi. The finding is detailed in a paper published by bioRxiv.
Bradshaw’s research focuses on the psychoactive mushroom genus Psilocybe, commonly known as magic mushrooms, and this discovery is part of an ongoing project to study Psilocybe diversity.
Magic mushrooms exploded in popularity as part of the hippie counterculture in the 1960s and 70s, though magic mushrooms, and the psychoactive compound they produce, psilocybin, have a long history, dating thousands of years to Mesoamerica, where it was used for religious purposes. However, after the Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1970, many scientists halted their research of psilocybin, so little is known about magic mushrooms in comparison to other fungi.
Bradshaw, who has done fieldwork in Central America, South America, Southeast Asia, Europe, and New Zealand, collaborates with museums across the globe to examine rare fungal specimens from their collections. Museums send Bradshaw samples, and he takes them into the lab for genetic and genomic sequencing to learn more about their biology.
“When you start collecting specimens and people hear about it, you get a reputation, and people start contacting you,” he says. This led to a partnership with Cathy Sharp of the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe, who sent Bradshaw two specimens, collected in 2011 in South Africa and in 1995 in Zimbabwe. He ran genomic sequencing on them and noticed that the specimen was similar to Psilocybe cubensis — but not the same.
Of the roughly 160 identified species of magic mushrooms globally, only seven had been found in Africa, says Bradshaw. There are likely more species across the continent, but limited research means they are currently undescribed. Bradshaw needed to make sure the sample sent by Sharp wasn’t one of the previously identified seven species from Africa. It’s common for these fungi to look different but be among the same species, a phenomenon known as morphological plasticity, Bradshaw explains. To determine if Psilocybe ochraceocentrata was novel, Bradshaw examined the genomic and genetic variation in comparison to Psilocybe cubensis and closely related species from Africa and Asia. In every test, it was different.
The finding helps support the idea Africa has a rich fungal community, whose diversity is not well understood, Bradshaw says.
“We don’t have a good understanding of the global diversity of fungi. If you were to make a map of known species and where they are from, the vast majority are from Europe and the coasts of the United States.” Some parts of Mexico and Australia have been heavily studied, and findings are ongoing in New Zealand and Southeast Asia. But Africa remains understudied, he says.
Because Sharp collected the specimen, she had the right to name the new species. She chose a classical naming scheme — picking a defining characteristic of the organism — so “Psilocybe ochraceocentrata” refers to the ochre center on the mushroom’s cap.
“Even though we ‘discovered’ it, people have been collecting it for a while,” says Bradshaw. “I think that these are very common, but because they look very similar to Psilocybe cubensis, people probably wrote them off as Psilocybe cubensis, which makes perfect sense.”
Bradshaw was originally a microbiologist working on bacterial genetics when he felt a desire to learn more about genomics. He fell in love with mushrooms and other fungi in graduate school and began researching in Bryn Dentinger’s newly established mycology lab at the Natural History Museum of Utah.
“There’s so much going on with fungal research regardless of where you look,” he says, noting that they have an air of mystery. “Whether you’re looking at them from a macroscopic level or studying how chemically diverse they are, we know very little about them compared to a lot of other organisms.”
