 Currently, there are 8,000-5,000 species of fungi described in literature. 9,000 of them can produce mushrooms. But only 71 of the mushroom-forming fungi can do this. Bioluminescence is the emission of cold and visible light by living being. It's a widespread phenomenon in nature. Although fungi bioluminescence has been first described by Aristotle in the 4th century BC, bioluminescent fungi still remain unknown for the most of people. In this talk, I will tell you a little bit about our work studying this incredible phenomenon. First, some information about fungi. The fungi I'm talking about live on the soil of the forest. It consists in a structure called mycelium. Mycelium has this spider web appearance. Under certain conditions of temperature, acidity, moisture, and nutrients, some fungi can produce mushrooms. Under the gills are produced spores that can initiate a new mycelium. In analogy to a plant, the mycelium is the tree and the mushroom is the fruit. These 71 species can be found all over the world. We can find a third of them in the whole Americas. Our group was responsible to find 20% of all the species described nowadays. Our work began in 2002 collecting mushrooms in the Atlantic forest in the state of São Paulo, in the Parque Estadual Turístico do Alto Ribeira. Then this year we start collecting in another biome in North Brazil, in Matadus Cocais. We collect it during the day and during the night. This is the mycelium of one of the species we have in our lab. As you can see, the mycelium can also emit light. We can find the same mycelium in the forest on rotting logs, seeds, and other kind of rotting material. This is the first species we found in Brazil on the Mavigilusens. As you can see, the light comes from the gills. In the case of mycinosterone, the light comes from the same place. Mycena fira emits light from the whole mushroom. This species is fantastic. Mycena luxeterna was awarded one of the top 10 new species in 2011. It was chosen among more than 10,000 species described that year. Nenotopanus garnari was first described by Garner in 1840 and reclassified by us last year. It's one of the brightest species in the world. It grows on the base of palms, mainly Babassu palms, in the north Brazil, in the state of PoE. The main goal of our research is to discover new species, to study the biochemical mechanism involved in light emission, to identify the genes and enzymes involved. They use the mycelium as an environmental toxicological assay and to study the functions of bioluminescence in nature. I want to give you an example of what we've been doing to study the functions of bioluminescence. There are some hypotheses to explain why do fungi emit light. One of them is to attract fungivores to sparse spores. The light that comes from the mushroom can attract an insect. When the insect lay eggs on the mushroom, some spores can drop on the insect. When the insect flies away, it can carry the spores and initiate a new mycelium far away from the original mushroom. The other possibility is as a warning signal, like, don't eat me, I'm poisonous. Personally, we believe in the first hypothesis. In order to prove this, we produced some fake mushrooms using resin, acrylic resin, and a green-led lamp. We produced two kinds of mushrooms because we have two different locations, and we left them in the forest. We put some glue on the surface in order to capture some insect attract by the light. This is the initial experiment. We were able to capture some beetles, flies, and crickets. This is the ongoing experiment in our group. We hope in the future we can contribute to elucidate some functions in fungal bioluminescence. I hope you have enjoyed. Thank you.