Research of fungi at West Virginia University has received a financial boost from the National Science Foundation (NSF). A $510,149 NSF grant will support WVU s International Collection of Vesicular-Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi, or INVAM , over the next five years.

“As the only large repository of these fungi in the world, we have the opportunity to carry out several important objectives during the next five years,”said Dr. Joseph Morton, INVAM director and professor in WVU s Davis College of Agriculture, Forestry and Consumer Sciences.

During the last decade and with NSF support, the staff of INVAM has established a collection of living fungi from an initial 184 cultures to a current library of 1,061. This collection focuses on germplasm from as wide a range of habitats as possible to maximize representation geographically and ecologically.

“We still want to continue with those efforts, but we also want to try and obtain fungi that individual researchers have taken the time to isolate, culture, and then use in experiments,”Morton said.”There are other small collections elsewhere in the world, and some of them are in danger of being lost with shifting of research priorities. We want to rescue those as well.”

WVU s INVAM is a unique resource in the realm of fungal research, according to Morton.”There are no textbooks on these fungi and no formal courses on the subject in high schools or colleges,”he said. To compensate, INVAM has developed a website http://invam.caf.wvu.edu/ that covers most of the basics, emphasizing taxonomy and providing links to other sites.”We want to significantly upgrade this website because of its high usage for both teaching and research,”he added.

The center hosts visitors from around the world, utilizing INVAM s resources to become familiar with the fungi and how to manipulate them. In the last year, the center has welcomed students and scientists from Pennsylvania State University, Cornell University, Columbia University and the Smithsonian Institution, along with entrepreneurs from a range of fields.

INVAM is the brainchild of Norman Schenck, a professor of plant pathology at the University of Florida and a long-time researcher in fungi. Schenck had a vision to create a living culture collection to preserve valuable germ plasm. In 1985, he received funding from the NSF and created the collection. He served as curator of the collection for five years until his retirement in 1990, when it was moved to WVU and merged with a local collection maintained by Morton.