Psathyrella praetenuis - A first for iNaturalist

Congratulations are in order to Malacothrix (Harte Singer) for being the first person on iNaturalist to observe Psathyrella praetenuis. He found it in Castro Valley, California and amplified the ITS gene at the biohacker space Counter Culture Labs in Oakland. The sequence is a 100% match for the holotype collected by AH Smith in Idaho in 1968.

This is a pretty rare find, as the only other person to have ever collected it according to all online records I could find (I checked Mycoportal, Google, Mushroom Observer and iNaturalist) is Oluna Ceska, who saw it in BC, Canada in 2009.

Harte and I submitted the sequence to Genbank, and set the Isolate field to http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/25957092 so the next person to find and sequence this rare species or a close relative will see the record. By setting the Isolate field this way, it is easy to see in the BLAST results that photos are available without having to click on the record and read the metadata.

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