Comment by doormatt

As I understand it, sequencing is the step that confirms the discovery, so it represents the culmination of the effort.

Biology is one of those fields where accidental discoveries still have value. Whether they earn the same recognition as some long grinding effort is up in the air, but it's a nice feather in the cap for a student.

There's the old saying: "Chance favors the prepared mind." The student must have had an insight that caused them to investigate something that many other people had probably overlooked or dismissed as unimportant.

I'm expecting the significant thing is knowing which DNA to sequence. Also, if I'm reading the article correctly she isolated the DNA being sequenced first, so it's not like she just sent in the fungus and offloaded all of the work.

>Question - how is it significant, considering they sent it off to another company to do the sequencing?

It's actually a little more complicated than they made it sound. What the student likely did was assemble the genome.

When you send DNA out for sequencing, you get back files of 100-300 basepairs. You then need to do assemble them into a genome by figuring out where all the pieces overlap.

Obviously there are tools that help with this, but there are lots of fiddly bits and settings that you need to play around with to get it right.

She did want to say: "It is amazing for a student to get this much success by a half accidental discovery"

Then she thought about things incomprehensible for programmers and said the other sentence.

The whole article feels a bit confusing, and I’m not really sure what they’re talking about. Are they saying the mushroom produces ergot alkaloids—the precursors to LSD? That would be interesting but not groundbreaking. Or are they claiming it actually produces LSD itself?

Fun fact: I once knew someone whose master’s thesis involved a solid-gas fluidized bed reactor—basically wheat kernels suspended in humid air, with ergot fungus growing on them. Ergotamine was then extracted from the air. The reactor was quite complex, spanning several floors, and was a gift from a now-defunct chemical giant.

I think what they mean is:

sequencing a genome [of a new species] is a significant thing

It's great for the student. And it shows that the lab she worked in and the university are able to do this type of science.

Sequencing a new fungus is not that rare. It's done all the time these past years. People discover new species all the time.

What is cool is that they already know a bit about where this fungus lives and what it might do.

The hard biology will be go actually culture it, test it's abilities and see what else it can do.

I mean the article is very short so this is me speculating, but if it is of interest they might figure out what the symbiosis really means to the plant and the fungus.

Also discovering the gene clusters that produce the active compounds will be cool and interesting.

Edit: just so it's clear, its amazing that the student was involved and had the trive to do this. It's easy to not be curious but she was and also she was in an environment where her curiosity was taken serious. That's a great feat of the superiviser or whoever else was involved

A full human sequence is only 2-5k USD so it's about money.

I doubt she wrote the grant, professor looks like he would give certain students undue credit.