For a team of researchers at the University of Kansas, fungal doomsday looks less like parasitic mushrooms transforming people into zombies, and more like the loss of a fungi collection that serves as a major global resource for sustainability and restoration.

The International Collection of Vesicular Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi, or INVAM, is tucked away in the Kansas Biological Survey buildings on KU’s campus. It’s a singular resource for studying and cataloguing arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, or AMF.

Terra K. Lubin, an associate researcher at KU and associate curator of INVAM, said that AMF support about 92% of terrestrial plants, which in turn sustain countless creatures.

The curators of INVAM fear that this “living library” will be the next casualty in the current administration’s campaign to defund scientific research, which puts people like Jim Bever in the hot seat.

Bever is a distinguished professor at KU in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology who co-manages a lab with Peggy Schultz, an associate specialist with KBS and the Environmental Studies Program. Together, Bever and Schultz are lead curators of the INVAM collection, which they brought to KU from Florida in 2023 with the support of National Science Foundation funds.

The collection relies on NSF grants which, even in a good year, are highly competitive and don’t promise the steady support needed for a long-term project like INVAM. The playing field is even dicier as Trump butts heads with Congress to shrink NSF’s budget by at least $300 million. 

Bever said they generally need $150,000 a year to sustain INVAM, most of which goes to people power. Currently, KU doesn’t offer reprise from their plight.

As a public research institution, it’s standard for the university to help fund the “how” portion of the research equation, but not the “who.” In this case, the university has invested extensively in a backup electrical system for the project’s cold room and greenhouse, but not the employees.

“That’s just the way this research institutions have developed in the United States over the last 70 years or more,” Bever said. “Currently, that is apparently being dismantled by the current administration, and there really isn’t a replacement for that. We’re in a junction where the system that has been building the incredible research capacity of this country is now not — it’s not clear it has the same support from the federal government as it did, and that’s why we’re in this position.”

The fungi caught in this political crossfire can’t be set aside for a few years and then easily revived. 

Liz Koziol is an assistant research professor at KU and associate curator of INVAM. She said that there are more than 900 samples, or isolates, that need to be grown and harvested once — sometimes twice — each year. Without that work, “they would be lost,” she said.

Bever said there isn’t a replacement for INVAM, and its loss could stymie understanding of AMF on a global scale.

“There’s just no other way around. It would be a tragedy for science and for the possibility for a more sustainable world,” he said.

From the lab to the land

INVAM doesn’t amass the type of fungi that helps brew beers, like yeast, or that germinate into mushrooms. AMF form obligate symbiotic relationships with plants, meaning they rely on flora to feed them carbon and sugar or they die. After millions of years of evolution, many plants have grown fond of their fungal hitchhikers, which can help them thrive.

Koziol translated what that means for humans, animals and other life on Earth.

“(AMF form relationships with) almost everything we eat: corn, soy, wheat, some fruits, oranges, apples,” she said. “… Very important for us as people who eat, you know, animals that eat, we wouldn’t be here without AMF.”

Folks can go out into the prairie to see AMF research in bloom.

Koziol works partly in prairie and grassland restoration. Using AMF from INVAM and the lab’s private collection, she’s helped transform former grazing lands on Gorrill Farmstead in Lawrence to a vibrant native prairie. 

Researchers who want to follow in Koziol’s footsteps can purchase cultures of AMF spores from INVAM, but they’re not limited to regional prairie restoration.

There are about 350 described AMF species in the world, which means they are “confirmed” as a distinct species. INVAM’s collection represents around 25% of those with 900 isolates. Any one described species may appear multiple times in the library, with isolates from different regions, climates and soils. 

Commercial growers aren’t turning to INVAM’s “small batch” supply, but the research still has implications for farmers or the everyday person’s garden.

At hardware and gardening stores, and even on Amazon, there’s an array of growth products that market themselves as containing mycorrhizae. Through a study, Koziol found that about 80% to 90% of those products in the U.S. are useless, either because the spores won’t grow or the product doesn’t contain spores in the first place. Researchers in other countries have yielded similar results.

“That’s the gap between the actual operational commercialization and the science,” Bever said. “It sort of illustrates the value of the collection, because without further improvement of knowledge and distribution of that knowledge, we will not be able to effectively commercialize these valuable microbials.”

Bever said there are precious few scientists in the country who know how to grow the AMF cultures properly for practical application. Many of those scientists, in fact, are clustered at INVAM.

Fostering the fungi

Lubin says she spends between 15 and 25 hours per week on the “fiddly bits” of the INVAM operation, on top of her personal research and other outreach projects. She’s one of the people who painstakingly organizes the cold storage room, where the dormant spores live before they’re regrown.

She and her colleagues employ a rotating team of undergraduate and graduate students, all pouring hours into INVAM’s upkeep. Regrowing 900 isolates per year means that the greenhouse is in operation 365 days a year. 

Lubin said that the work is a labor of love, heavy on the labor.

The last round of NSF funding has dried up and the team is prepping their next application. In the meantime, INVAM is currently sustaining itself on revenue from its culture sales, an impermanent solution. If they can’t secure enough funding to buoy the labor, INVAM might have to close, although the exact expiration date is unclear. 

On Tuesday, the team launched a fund with KU Endowment, where anyone can donate to bolster their financial reserves.

“We’re hoping that if we raise an endowment, that could provide baseline funding for the collection,” Bever said. “I think that we would all be in a much better place.”

As the team treads new water, doing double duty as scientists and fungi advocates, they hope that folks will keep turning to the resources on their website, reaching out with questions and engaging with their social media when they have a second in the midst of fungi-growing to post.

People can donate to the KU Endowment fund at this link. Keep up with KBS and INVAM on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at wulfe@lawrencekstimes.com.

Read their complete bio here. Read their work for the Times here.

Molly Adams (she/her), photo editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2022. She can be reached at molly@lawrencekstimes.com.

Check out more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.

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