Mushrooms were found in the vicinity of a mummy at a secluded temple
in South America. These mushrooms were either used as food or as hallucinogenic
agents to reach a trance during rituals. We can only test these hypotheses
if the names of the mushrooms are known. Unfortunately, they are poorly
preserved and identifications cannot be made based on their morphologies.
We are therefore going to use an alternative method, based on their
DNA sequence characteristics, to identify the mushrooms.
In this project we will extract DNA from the mushroom samples that
were obtained from the temple. A specific gene will then be isolated
from the extracted DNA. The next step will be to obtain DNA sequences
from this gene. Finally these DNA sequences will be compared with those
available for the same gene from databases on the world-wide-web. The
identity of the mushrooms from the temple is based on the names of
mushrooms that have DNA sequences similar or identical to the gene
sequenced in our lab.
