The Royal Botanical Gardens (RGB), Kew is embarking on a digitalisation project of its Fungarium to make research readily available online for researchers and scientists.

Below the RBG, Kew site sits Kew’s Fungarium, a preserved collection of 1.1m individual fungal specimens.

In 2024, Kew’s scientists researched the genetic information of 50,000 type specimens for the Fungarium Sequencing Project. It looks to sequence around 7,000 of these fungi to make the data openly available online over the coming years.

According to Kew, resources like the this act as an important tool in the ongoing fight against climate change and biodiversity loss.

Lee Davies, fungarium collections manager at RBG Kew says the Fungarium is unlike any other across the world, adding:

“It is exciting to see these collections become more accessible outside of Kew, not only as specimen images and data, but also the molecular data which is locked away in the specimens.”

Examples of fungi kept within the exhibition include gibellula attenboroughii, more commonly referred to as David Attenborough’s ‘zombie fungus’, which attacks its invertebrate host with spore-spreading mechanisms.

Cordyceps caloceroides is shaped similar to a tarantula and has been useful in Chinese based research studying its potential as a natural insecticide against malaria-carrying mosquitos.

A fungi that produced penicillin, penicillium rubens was studied by Sir Alexander Fleming in the years preceding his Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945 and is now kept at Kew.