The so-called symbiotic relationship between trees and the fungus that grow on their roots may actually work more like a capitalist market relationship between buyers and sellers, according to the new study published in the journal New Phytologist.Recent experiments in the forests of Sweden had brought into a question a long-held theory of biology: that the fungi or mycorrhizae that grow on tree roots work with trees in a symbiotic relationship that is beneficial for both the fungi and the trees, providing needed nutrients to both parties. These fungi, including many edible mushrooms, are particularly common in boreal forests with scarce nutrients. But in contrast to the current paradigm, the new research shows that they may be the cause rather than the cure for the nutrient scarcity.In the recent experiments, researchers found that rather than alleviating nutrient limitations in soil, the root fungi maintain that limitation, by transferring less nitrogen to the trees when nutrients are scarce than when they are abundant in the soil. The new study, led by IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management researcher Oskar Franklin in collaboration with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, used a theoretical model to explain the new experimental findings, by simulating the interaction between individual fungus and plant. It suggests that since each organism competes with others in trading nutrients such as carbon and nitrogen, the system as a whole may function more like a capitalistic market economy than a cooperative symbiotic relationship. The competition among trees makes them export excessive amounts of carbon to the fungi, which seize a lot of soil nutrients.
A new study has revealed that fungi, often seen as pests, play a crucial role policing biodiversity in rainforests.The research, by scientists at Oxford University, the University of Exeter and Sheffield University, found that fungi regulate diversity in rainforests by making dominant species victims of their own success.“Fungi prevent any single species from dominating rainforests as they spread more easily between plants and seedlings of the same species. If lots of plants from one species grow in the same place, fungi quickly cut their population down to size, levelling the playing field to give rarer species a fighting chance. Plots sprayed with fungicide soon become dominated by a few species at the expense of many others, leading to a marked drop in diversity.”
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Genetic material from fungi collections at Purdue University and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, helped a team of researchers resolve the mushroom "tree of life," a map of the relationships between key mushroom species and their evolutionary history that scientists have struggled to piece together for more than 200 years.The group used DNA from frozen, heat-dried and freeze-dried specimens to analyze a dataset of 39 genomes representing most of the known families in Agaricales, the order that houses some of the most familiar kinds of mushrooms, including cultivated edible mushrooms, magic mushrooms and the deadly destroying angel. High-throughput sequencing technology allowed the scientists to define seven new suborders and the "trunk" of the Agaricales tree, providing a framework for testing hypotheses of the evolution of mushrooms."Mycology really is one of the last frontiers in biology," said Catherine Aime, associate professor of mycology, the study of fungi. "We know there are six to 20 times more species of fungi than plants, but we don't really know much about them. People have tried to figure out how mushrooms are related since the time of Linnaeus. It's gratifying to finally solve this mystery.""We may be on the verge of a major collections-based revolution," she said. "People think of fungaria as similar to stamp collections - they're not. These collections anchor our concepts of everything in biology and are our only repositories for some dying or possibly already-extinct species. It's extraordinarily important that we try to collect and preserve as many species as we can. Future technology may allow us to use those materials in ways we can't even imagine now. We've got to get them before they go."
The human diet during the Magdalenian phase of Europe's Upper Palaeolithic between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago is poorly known. This is particularly a problem regarding food resources that leave little trace such as plant foods. An international research team, led by Robert Power of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has now explored diet in the period through dental calculus analysis on Magdalenian individuals found at El Mirón Cave in Cantabria, Spain. The researchers found that already Upper Palaeolithic individuals used a variety of plant foods and mushrooms, in addition to other food sources.[...]Archaeologists know almost nothing about the early use of fungi. Although their use is poorly understood in prehistory, ethnographers have noted that recent hunter-gatherers have often used fungi as food, flavouring and medicine. Mushroom use has firmly been identified from as early as the European Chalcolithic. The Chalcolithic Tyrolean Iceman "Ötzi" carried several types of fungi on his person. "This finding at El Mirón Cave could be the earliest indication of human mushroom use or consumption, which until this point has been unidentified in the Palaeolithic", says Robert Power.
