Utah State University researchers led by Erika Espinosa-Ortiz have received a $900,000 grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to test whether fungal networks use electrical activity to sense and respond to their environment. The team plans to build a non-invasive imaging tool based on genetically encoded fluorescent proteins that change brightness with the electrical potential of the fungal cell membrane, then use machine learning to analyse the resulting datasets.

A landmark study published in Science has produced the first global estimate of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks, finding roughly 110 quadrillion kilometres (about 68 quadrillion miles) of living fungal threads in the top 15 centimetres of Earth's soils. Researchers from SPUN, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and more than a dozen institutions combined data from over 16,000 soil samples with robotic imaging of 300,000 individual fungal strands to build machine-learning ma