Since my last post on April 7, about how I extracted the DNA from the specimens and prepared it to be sequenced, I have sent the samples off to be sequenced by Macrogen. Four of the five samples were able to be sequenced, which is good odds given that it was my first time doing the procedure and that some of the fungi were older. I knew that four of them worked, because after receiving the sequences online, I downloaded the sequences from Macrogen and used the website Nucleotide BLAST® (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), a part of GenBank®, to compare our sequence to others that had already been uploaded to GenBank®. Nucleotide BLAST® gives a match with sequences that had already been uploaded. If there is a 98-100% match with a them, then we could safely say that they were the same species.
Something interesting happened when we tried to identify the veiled polypore, or popcorn conk. We searched for it on Nucleotide BLAST®, but the closest sequence match in Nucleotide BLAST® said that it was a totally different fungus, even though it was known that it was the veiled polypore, or popcorn fungus. It was confusing until we found out that GenBank® had not had any submissions of this fungus in that particular gene region, the ITS region. This is interesting because the popcorn conk is very common, so it is surprising that no one had uploaded a submission.
Therefore, three new submissions were uploaded and they should be of use to many people. I now have my name on a GenBank® submission, which I never expected to happen.
~Patrick
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