Vincent Merckx

Museum duty today @naturalis.bsky.social These colleagues are giving me a skeptical look 👀

The @erc.europa.eu MIXOTROPH sampling in Japan has come to an end. The success of this campaign was due to the support of Prof. Kenji Suetsugu (Kobe University) and his incredible team. I’m looking forward to continue our collaboration! 🌳 🍄

And here, mycoheterotrophic plants thrive too

The last leg of the fieldwork brought me to the beautiful island of Yakushima. The lush ceder forests are incredible examples of the power of nature conservation, as most have been replanted in the 1960s. And if you walk far enough, you can still see trees of more than 1000 year old…

Amazing news!! Congrats!!

Take care. All those obligations are nothing compared to your health.

The @naturalis.bsky.social MIXOTROPH team headed to Shiga prefecture to sample a forest site with Burmannia cryptopetala. Sample site nr 3 in Japan ✅

It was my pleasure! Thank you for the opportunity to talk; I’m very curious about the results of your work!

A beautiful mixed forest near Nagoya with plenty of Petrosavia sakurai became our next sampling site 🌳 🌲

Ja, en als je in de schaduw groeit moet je als plant vindingrijk zijn om koolstof te komen (althans, dat is de hypothese).

We gaan planten verzamelen in bossen voor een project waarbij we onderzoeken of sommige bosplanten koolstof kunnen opnemen uit bodemschimmels (koolstof die de schimmels dan weer krijgen van de bomen).

With some tiny plant wonders: Burmannia championii, Sciaphila japonica, and Gentiana zollingeri 🌱

Today we tackled our first field site in the hills of Hyogo

The @naturalis.bsky.social MIXOTROPH team is in Kobe, Japan for some more sampling!

I have a PhD position available at @naturalis.bsky.social to work on soil biodiversity and drought in urban environments, as part of the NWA Thirsty Cities project 🏡🌳🍄

👉🏻 www.naturalis.nl/en/about-us/...

Had a super inspiring visit to the lab of @vkokkoris.bsky.social today @vuamsterdam.bsky.social Sometimes the most promising opportunities are just around the corner 🍄‍🟫🌿

Our newest research in @nature.com

We built a robot (!) to track plant-fungal trade networks. By following half a million fungal highways & nutrient flows within them, we discovered how plants & fungi build hyper-efficient supply chains

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📹 @sasaspacal.bsky.social

Nature Today | Amsterdamse straatbomen leven samen met enorme diversiteit aan schimmels De diversiteit aan 'goede' schimmels rond de wortels van Amsterdamse stadsbomen is verrassend hoog. Iepen op de meest verstedelijkte locatie bleken zelfs de meest diverse schimmelgemeenschappen te heb...

Nature Today: Amsterdamse straatbomen leven samen met enorme diversiteit aan schimmels

www.naturetoday.com/intl/nl/natu...

Join our lab in Amsterdam. We are looking for a Netherlands-based Technician/Analist (MBO-4 level) to apply advanced microscopy, imaging, and molecular techniques to study fungal-plant interactions. 2-yr position

See link for details. Applications due Feb 23rd.
workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/te...

Interesting opinion by @brentcemerson.bsky.social

Delimiting Species—Prospects and Challenges for DNA Barcoding Discovering, describing and cataloguing global species diversity remains a fundamental challenge both for biodiversity research and for the management and conservation of biodiversity. Among animals,....

“It is predicted that the number of novel operational taxonomic units delimited by barcode sequencing is likely to eclipse the number of species described by Linnean taxonomy by as early as 2029”

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Histogram with a somewhat bell-shaped peak around 1980. X axis - years, Y axis - number of specimens collected.

‪When did herbarium in Leiden become this big? Trends in collection of regular specimens vs. types; fungi and lichens; notable collectors and expeditions. (Mind that only ca. 20% of fungarium is digitized.)

Some ectomycorrhizal root tips I recently had the pleasure of photographing. #mycorrhizal #emfungi #mycorrhizae

Frontiers | Opinion: Response to questions about common mycorrhizal networks Common mycorrhizal networks (CMNs) are networks of mycorrhizal fungal hyphae held in common by at least two plants (Horton 2015;Rillig et al. 2024) and were ...

www.frontiersin.org/journals/for...

Arbuscular mycorrhiza in the urban jungle: Glomeromycotina communities of the dominant city tree across Amsterdam Trees in cities provide a great number of benefits to people and nature, but they are challenged by harsh conditions. Trees rely on helpful fungi in their roots to get essential nutrients from the so...

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Stoked about this manuscript, many years in the making. We present an original resource of ~700 highly curated plastid MAGs of marine pelagic algae. Among these we found a novel deep branching group of plastid genomes; we informally call them leptophytes
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Flags in the forest: the @naturalis.bsky.social MIXOTROPH team is mapping mycorrhizal networks in Khao Yai National Park 🍄🌳 #mycorrhiza #mixotrophy

And lots of encounters today!

Final stop in Thailand: Khao Yai National Park. Beautiful views and forests with giant members of the Burmanniaceae family: Burmannia disticha #mycoheterotrophy #mixotrophy @naturalis.bsky.social

And we found exactly what we were looking for: green and non-green species of Burmannia (Burmanniaceae).