New mushroom species glows green at night

Beijing Science and Technology News, November 1, 2006: According to National Geographic of the United States, in Ribeira Valley State Park not far from Sao Paulo, Brazil, a cluster of mushrooms glows green at night or in dark places.

There are about 500 species of fungi worldwide, and 33 of them glow. This mushroom is one of the newly discovered glowing species. During the day, this mushroom is unremarkable, but at night, a chemical reaction makes it emit a soft and strange green light, sometimes called "foxfire."

Since 2002, Cassius Stevani, professor of chemistry at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, Dennis Desjardin, professor of mycology at San Francisco State University in the United States, and Marina Capelari of the Botanical Institute of Brazil have successively discovered more than 10 species of glowing fungi, four of which were found in Brazil's tropical rainforest. Their work increased the number of glowing fungal species by 30% on the basis of the 1970s.

These 33 species of glowing fungi belong to 16 different lineages. People cannot help but ask: during the course of evolution, did fungi undergo 16 evolutions, or did they evolve only a few times? To find the answer, Desjardin's research group began extracting DNA from glowing mushrooms and sequencing the DNA.