Plastics and Swatch Bharat

Plastic and plastic products have become part of our daily life. The plastic products, everything that we use today, from ordinary carry-bags to eating plates, injection syringes to surgical tools, chairs, tables, and numerous other electronic appliances, are used and disposed off so casually almost everywhere... Heaps of plastic are seen accumulated on roadsides, drainage, fields, forests, rivers, sea-shores, beaches and everywhere. It’s truly horrifying..!  

If we want to achieve cleanliness of our surroundings and eventually Swatch Bharat, first we must reduce or avoid indiscriminate use of plastic and plastic products. This move demands search for or development of a suitable degradable substitute for plastic. There are a few biodegradable products in use, in every area of our living, from catering to medical, but none of them has made a big headway as a total substitute to plastic. 

Search for a sustainable alternative to plastic should therefore be a priority area of interest....

D. Jayarama Bhat

Birthday and fungi.......

Birthdays are just annual memos of adding a number to ones age; it’s a time-bound message or reminder of the process of growth. It is realised that as one gets aged, the ability to respond or react is subdued, both physically and mentally. Yet, thanks to advancement in science and greater awareness of hygiene in living conditions; most perform well sufficiently long period of time, these days......

Stepping into 69, I fondly greet my dear and near ones, friends and all well-wishers for making our life meaningful..........

 (In front of Murudeshwar temple)

In 1993, I described, illustrated and named an interesting and novel asexual-morph fungus as Xenoheteroconium bicolor Bhat W.B. Kendrick & Nag Raj, (Bhat et al. 1993, in Mycotaxon) isolated from decaying leaf litter, collected from Agumbe, a small village in malnad region of Karnataka. This region, earlier called the Cherrapunji of southern India because of very high yearly rainfall, had thick, moist-deciduous forests those days....... 

This microscopic, saprophytic, hyphomycetous fungus, Xenoheteroconium bicolour, was interesting in that it produced two types of septate conidia: first, long primary conidia developed holoblastically, in small acropetal chains, on mononemtous conidiophores; second, short secondary conidia developed as lateral branches, on primary conidia.

  

 (Xenoheteroconium bicolour from India)

I had been to Agumbe a few times subsequently, accompanying students on field expeditions. I always had a feeling in my mind that I will see Xenoheteroconium again, because it has been my thinking that fungi are always there in nature.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see the fungus again.... Such issues when get recapitulated in our minds, thoughts often come; where are these fungi......?

During my recent visit to Dali University in China, I saw a M.Sc. dissertation in the Department of Agriculture and Biotechnology, with description and illustration of Xenoheteroconium bicolor that they sourced from leaf litter collected from the forests of Yunnan Province, China, in 2010.  I saw hardly any difference; morphologically, it was the same fungus as ours....!  

   

(Xenoheteroconium bicolour from China)

Perusal of literature indicates that some of the fungi described from the forests of India are rediscovered/redescribed from the jungles of other Asian and Latin American countries. From look, they all seem similar! I call this a sort of 'discontinuous distribution' of fungi across the globe.......... 

This of course tells that fungi are everywhere...!

D. Jayarama Bhat