A 40-year journey leads to a new truffle species

Date:
August 4, 2020
Source:
Oregon State University
Summary:
Forty years after Dan Luoma found an unsual truffle collection,
scientists confirmed it is a new species and named it after Luoma.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
As a first-year graduate student studying truffle ecology at Oregon
State University, Dan Luoma attended a scientific meeting in 1981 on
Orcas Island in Washington. Having recently learned how to search for
truffles, he went out one day of the meeting looking for the prized
fungi and found a collection.


==========================================================================
He brought them back to Oregon State and showed them to his mentor James Trappe, who confirmed the collection was of an undescribed species. Trappe added it to the university's collection. Then it sat there.

Almost four decades later, with the help of new scientific technologies,
Trappe and several other scientists confirmed that the truffle is
unique. They recently published their findings in the journal Fungal Systematics and Evolution recognizing it as a new species. Fittingly,
it's named Tuber luomae after Luoma, who retired this year after 40
years at Oregon State.

"This truffle in 1981 was among the first truffles I ever found,"
Luoma said.

"To have it named in my honor the year I retired completes the circle
for me.

It's a wonderful way to celebrate retirement." Some truffle species
are highly prized for culinary purposes because of their distinct
flavor. These species, which are black, white or brown, are hard to find
and exist in limited geographic areas, meaning they command high prices.

Oregon and the Pacific Northwest are home to several of those prized
species, making the region one of the world's hot spots for truffle
hunting. The species discovered by Luoma, though, is a red truffle,
which doesn't have the distinct flavor sought by chefs and cooks.



========================================================================== While the culinary use of truffles and the thrill of searching for them
gets a lot of attention, they and other fungi are important for the
health of forests.

They provide nutrients to plants and can also help plants withstand
drought.

Luoma studied the ecology of truffles and fungi while earning his
doctorate from Oregon State in 1988 and until earlier this year worked
as a researcher at the university.

Several graduate students who worked with him during his early years
planned to name the truffle species he found on Orcas Island in honor
of Luoma, but they graduated before doing so.

Then about 10 years ago Trappe, now Luoma's colleague, searched the
Oregon State truffle collections, the largest in the world with about
50,000 collections, looking for truffles similar to the one Luoma found
on Orcas Island. Trappe found three.

Joyce Eberhart, a truffle researcher at Oregon State and Luoma's wife,
and Greg Bonito, an assistant professor at Michigan State University,
studied the DNA of those three and determined they were the same species
as the Orcas Island truffle.

Those three were all found in Oregon -- one each in Benton (found in
1962), Clackamas (1995) and Jackson (2012) counties. While the Benton
County specimen was found before Luoma dug up the Orcas Island one,
it was never fully described until Trappe noticed the similarities
between the two. Now the known distribution of the new species extends
from southwestern Oregon to northwestern Washington.

Carolina Pin~a Pa'ez, a doctoral student at Oregon State who also does
truffle research, provided the final piece by documenting the microscopic structures inside the truffle with photos, confirming that the spores
and outer layers were that of a unique species.

Trappe, who has studied truffles for more than 60 years and has discovered
230 new truffle species, still gets excited about a new species, such
as this one named after Luoma.

"Many dozens of professional and amateur mycologists have sought truffles
in western Oregon for over 100 years, but only these four collections of Luoma's truffle have been found. Each of those seems to be quite local
in distribution, indicating that it's a very rare fungus," Trappe said.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Oregon_State_University. Original
written by Sean Nealon.

Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. J. Eberhart, J. Trappe, C. Pin~a Pa'ez, G. Bonito. Tuber luomae,
a new
spiny-spored truffle species from the Pacific Northwest, USA. Fungal
Systematics and Evolution, 2020; DOI: 10.3114/fuse.2020.06.15 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200804100200.htm

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