Equipped for success: Genomes and metabolites of the European Amanita muscaria are conserved in its novel South African range

The fly agaric, the red mushroom with white spots from fairy tales, is not native to South Africa. It was introduced with forestry. People have moved plants and soil around the world for centuries, yet invasive mushrooms get very little attention.

Writing in New Phytologist, the team sequenced the genomes of 24 fly agarics from both hemispheres and built a family tree. The South African mushrooms came from Europe. In fact the fly agaric's near-worldwide spread comes from several separate introductions of a single European lineage into the Southern Hemisphere.

The researchers then studied the fungus's chemistry: both the gene clusters that let it make special compounds, and the compounds themselves. European and African mushrooms carry almost the same set of gene clusters, and only 13 of 273 chemical families were found in South Africa alone. Extracts from every mushroom killed nematodes (tiny roundworms), while the microbes and flies tested were unaffected.

Why it matters: after a long time in its new home, the fungus has not lost a single one of these chemical tools. That suggests they still do useful jobs for it, and it shows how an introduced species can arrive fully equipped to succeed.