A chemist and environmental toxicologist by training, Ziortza Agirrezabala Urkia’s path crossed the one of marine fungi almost by chance. «I was finishing my master’s, and a research center working in marine and food technologies called my supervisor and said: “Look, we have this project and all this data on marine bacteria from these samples, do you want to try the same with fungi?”.»
In the past few months, Agirrezabala Urkia was a visiting doctoral researcher at the Mycotheca Universitatis Taurinensis of the University of Turin. She completed all of her studies at the University of the Basque Country, in Spain, and is now a fourth year PhD student there, working on identifying the marine fungi present in sediments on the Basque coast and testing them for biotechnological applications. «The fungi I am looking at come from sediments in estuaries, so it is a bit of a mix of saline water, fresh water, and pollution coming from both the sea and the river.» One of the central themes in her research is understanding the ability of these fungi to degrade certain compounds. «For example, we have focused on the ability to degrade polysaccharides: we are interested in seeing which enzymes are produced by these fungi, to see if they can then be used in pharmaceutical applications. Another interesting question is whether they can degrade industrial dyes and what enzymes are at work in this degradation mechanism.»
Identifying the fungi from the sediment isolates was the main reason that brought her to Turin. «I wanted to identify at least part of the collection of isolates we have from the very beginning of my PhD. However, I’m not a mycologist, so we went ahead with other parts of the project and only sequenced and identified the ones we were interested in.» The collection at her university consists of nearly 300 isolates. «While in Turin, we managed to identify more than a third of them, which was very nice, because marine fungi is quite tricky to isolate, grow and then identify.»
Coming from the smaller city of San Sebastian, she was worried about spending three months in a metropolis like Turin. «But actually, I liked it more than I expected. Turin is a really calm city, it really surprised me.»
