A team at WSU Tri-Cities is researching a type of fungus that could replace chemical fertilizers in crops.

The team is working to see if applying inoculants that contain arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi can help plants absorb light and water, said KC Cifizzari, biology graduate student. The team wants to reduce fertilizer use and provide alternative management strategies.

Using the fungi would not require growers to fertilize their crops every year, said Tanya Cheeke, assistant professor in WSU’s School of Biological Sciences. Once the fungi are added it would serve as a biofertilizer for the plants.

“One of the things about these fungi is that once you add them to the soil, as long as they’re not killed in some way, they are generally self-propagating,” Cifizzari said.

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Daily Evergreen

Glyphosate is a common weed-killing chemical used in agriculture, and it may be best known as the active ingredient in Roundup herbicides. It’s estimated that as many as 90 percent of corn and 94 percent of soybean crops have been genetically engineered to tolerate the herbicide. Its safety has been the subject of fierce debate for many years, and while studies have indicated that it poses no threat to human health, other research has suggested that it may increase the risk of cancer.

“While we can’t fix what’s wrong in the individual who is exposed, we can potentially use this to diagnose if someone has a higher chance of getting kidney or prostate disease later in life, and then prescribe a therapeutic or lifestyle change to help mitigate or prevent the disease,” said corresponding study author Michael Skinner, a professor of biological sciences at Washington State University. Previous work by the Skinner lab has suggested that glyphosate causes heritable epigenetic changes.

“We need to change how we think about toxicology,” Skinner said. “Today worldwide, we only assess direct exposure toxicology; we don’t consider subsequent generational toxicity. We do have some responsibility to our future generations.”

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Lab roots
Gen News

The state of our planet’s pollinators took a big blow in 2020. The annual Thanksgiving count of Western Monarch butterflies this year by the Xerces Society yielded less than 2,000 individuals, a tragic threshold that has experts worried about the future of the species

Cheryl Schultz, an entomologist at Washington State University spoke to Bay Nature about the drastic drop in population.

“We were expecting it to come in low, but not that low,” she said. “If I had to make a guess three months ago, I think we would all have been talking about less than 10,000. But coming in at less than 3,000. That’s…unexpected.”

In particular, migrating populations of the North American Monarch butterfly are hurt by the decline in habitat. As more biodiversity is paved over for the sake of urban development, the North American Monarch is losing more of its habitat, including its overwintering spots in Mexico and California.

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