An international group of researchers, including those from Ghana are in a race against time to discover and preserve fungi species before they are lost to rising seas.
Agriculture is key to the economy of Ghana: making up over half of its GDP, 40% of exports and with about 4 in 10 farm laborers being women—and fungi could be a key to help farmers and alleviate food insecurity.
Jacob Ulzen, a Ghanaian biologist and research fellow at the Forest and Horticultural Crops Research Centre at the University of Ghana, explains that he’s currently mapping Ghanaian species of mycorrhizal fungi, which supply water and nutrients to plants in exchange for sugars and other organic compounds.
“Mycorrhizal fungi plays several key roles including nutrient provision, carbon storage in soils, pollination, environmental stress, and plant protection,” he says, adding that these benefits of the mycorrhizal fungi have not been fully harnessed in Africa particularly Ghana.
“Mycorrhizal fungi forms association with almost all major crops grown in Ghana; and it has been predicted that Ghana has high abundance of mycorrhizal fungi along the coastal and rainforest areas,” he says, adding that these species are threatened by erosion and rising seas levels in coastal areas.
“This study is expected to identify mycorrhizal species that offer diverse services in agricultural and environmental systems,” Ulzen says, adding that this will have implications for agricultural practices and restoration of coastal forests of Ghana.
Ulzen and Toby Kiers, executive director of SPUN and a professor of evolutionary biology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands were key in a 2024 Society for the Protection of Underground Networks trip to Ghana, involving a workshop with 12 early career West African scientists to learn a new sequencing technology for fungi.
Ulzen explains that SPUN bought sequencing equipment, sieves, consumables, and pipettes for his laboratory to support the expedition and workshops.
Kiers says much more R&D is needed before these techniques can be used smoothly by researchers in West Africa, but it offers hope and a potential pathway for countries to have more control and autonomy in documenting and utilizing their microbial resources.
“This is urgent as ever because sea level rise threatens many of the coastal mycorrhizal communities — an easy to use technology is needed now so these fungi can be documented and described before they are under the sea,” she says.
Growing up in Ghana
Ulzen grew up in Ghana, in Kumasi and Cape Coast.
“I did not have a childhood eureka as I wanted to be a professional footballer, but my father and grandfather insisted on me attending school and becoming a scholar,” he says.
Ulzen says his passion for agricultural science was shaped by his junior high school agricultural teacher.
“He taught us with passion: this made me want to study agricultural science at senior high school and university,” he says, adding that he had wanted to become a plant breeder but a scholarship opportunity came up to study soil science
“I have never regretted choosing to become a soil scientist,” he says, adding that scientists from the Global South understands the cultural and social implications of the thoughts and actions of their farmers.
“Solutions that do not consider these factors are likely not be sustainable: aside from the social and cultural aspects, scientist from the global south also understands the agricultural systems better than their colleagues from the Global North,” he says, adding that , scientists from the Global South augment their academic and scientific knowledge with local indigenous knowledge.
How Can Fungus In Cameroon Help Farmers?
Another member of the same expedition was Astride Carole Djeuani, a lecturer and researcher at the University of Yaounde in Cameroon,
She’s looking at how fungus could be used as fertilizer to improve plant production for farmers. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) supply water, phosphate and nitrogen to the host plant and in receive up to 20% of plant-fixed carbon in return — a useful symbiosis.
Djeuani says it is important to research the AMF around plant roots, because they can be used as fertilizer to improve plant yields.
“Today the damages caused by the application of chemicals in agriculture are very obvious, so hopefully, the strains that I would have isolated and multiplied after screening tests in the laboratory, will serve as a fertilizer factory that I will make available to farmers,” she says, adding that the idea is to add these AMFs with biochar and compost to fertilize the plants.
“The luck we have is that Cameroon has five agro-ecological zones, and therefore we think that this is a very broad study opportunity in terms of understanding and determining subsoil mycorrhizal strains,” she says, “My biggest challenge is to be able to explore and understand the underground of my country for various ecosystems and as well determine its diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.”
