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What are Fungi?

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By Michael Greenwood, [Link] by Emily Henderson, [Link].

A fungus (plural: fungi) is a type of eukaryotic organism belonging to the kingdom Fungi,
alongside plants, animals, protozoa, and monera. Fungi are incredibly diverse, with
commonly encountered forms including yeast, molds, truffles, and mushrooms.

Most fungi are microscopic, consisting of thread-like structures less than 10 µm in

diameter named hyphae. These branching structures grow into a root-like vegetative
mass named a mycelium, which acts to absorb nutrients from the environment rather
than relying on photosynthesis. A wide variety of nutrient sources are utilized by fungi,
from soil and water to decaying matter and other living organisms.

Parasitic fungi that commandeer nutrients from plant hosts utilize specialized hyphal
structures that allow them to penetrate host cells. Fungus cells bear a cell wall, which
unlike the cell wall in plant or bacterial cells is composed largely of chitin, the same
molecule used in the exoskeleton of crustaceans and insects.
You Didn’t Know Mushrooms Could Do All This | National Geographic
What types of fungi are there?

Fungi have been categorized based on their method of sexual reproduction into five
phyla, though many examples of controversial classification exist, wherein new genetic
evidence suggests that fungi previously thought to be unrelated are close cousins
and vice versa. The first of the five phyla is chytridiomycosis (Chytrids), the oldest
lineage of fungi.

Most are unicellular and live in an aquatic environment, swimming with the aid of a
single flagellum and frequently acting as parasites to insects, plants, and amphibians.
The phylum Zygomycota (conjugated fungi) mostly feed on decaying materials and thus
are commonly seen as molds, though some also act as insect parasites.

The Ascomycota (sac fungi) encompass most known fungi and include many edible
species such as yeast, truffles, and morels, while many acts as parasites and also
produce toxic secondary metabolites. The Basidiomycota (club fungi) bear large swollen
nodules at the terminal end of their hyphae that act as their reproductive organs, often
seen as mushrooms.

Mushrooms are the spore-bearing fruiting body of the fungus, usually consisting of a
stem and cap with gills on the underside, though the fruiting body of some types of
gilled fungi do not possess a stem or cap. Most mushroom-producing types of fungi
belong to the order Agaricales, defined by bearing spore-releasing gills. Historically,
almost all gill-bearing mushrooms were grouped into this category, though modern DNA
analysis has revealed that agarics are more diverse than previously thought, and
several gill-bearing species actually belong to distinct orders. Interestingly, this is a case
of convergent evolution, where gill structures have developed separately in several
lineages.

Similarly, puffball mushrooms with enclosed spore-bearing structures have been found
to have independently evolved at least four times throughout history. In a paper by
Hibbett et al. (1997) the authors identify the evolution of closed-spore-bearing structures
in several species of fungi from exposed-spore structure bearing ancestors, though
evidence of adaptation in the reverse direction has never been noted. The occurrence
of enclosed-spore species may be due to a common loss of function in developmental
pathways that results in pedomorphism, adult specimens that retain features normally
only seen in juveniles.

In any case, fungi with enclosed spores generally also evolve mechanisms of forcible
spore dispersal that would be impeded by an evolutionary step towards exposed
spores, and thus this may be the reason that no fungi have been seen to transition from
closed to exposed spore structures.

Image Credit: Kateryna Kon/[Link]

What are the origins of fungi?

Fungi are an ancient form of life, thought to have diverged from our common ancestor
around 1.5 billion years ago and subsequently colonized land around 500 million years
ago, well before the emergence of the first tetrapods onto land. However, given the soft
body of fungi, fossils are rare, and thus it is difficult to establish their true ancestry,
though fossilized spores embedded in plant or animal fossils can be found and studied
using microscopy techniques such as scanning electron microscopy.

The diversity of life on Earth.

Recently, a paper by Loron et al. (2019) published to Nature demonstrated that fungi
may have colonized the land much earlier than thought by applying spectroscopic
analysis to 1 billion-year-old shale formations in arctic Canada, finding multicellular
organic-walled microfossils with a strong resemblance to the branching and terminal
bulbous structures of hyphae. Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy also confirmed
the presence of chitin and chitosan within the microfossils, the major component of the
fungi cell wall.

The authors suggest that fungi may have played a key role in shaping both aquatic and
terrestrial ecosystems for future species given their ability to engage in organic matter
degradation, phosphate fixation, and the formation of symbiotic relationships. If fungi
thrived on land as early as 1 billion years ago they may have prepared the soil for the
arrival of plants and subsequently acted in a symbiotic manner with them, allowing for
the formation of niches and greater diversification.

How do fungi reproduce?

Fungi can reproduce by many mechanisms, both sexually and asexually, with the
particular mechanisms employed dependant on species. Asexual reproduction usually
occurs in fungal mycelium via mycelial fragmentation, allowing large clonal populations
adapted to a specific role to rapidly disperse.

Sexual reproduction by meiosis has been observed in almost all fungi, though genetic
analysis suggests that the remainder also engages in sexual reproduction to a limited
extent. Some species of fungus are sexed, and thus require a “male” and “female” to
produce offspring (heterothallic), while others are homothallic, and are capable of
sexual reproduction with themselves. In homothallic fungi, the opposing sexual
functions are performed by separate cells belonging to the same mycelium.
Many species of fungi switch between asexual and sexual reproduction regularly or
based on extrinsic triggers, allowing a flourish of genetic diversity to be generated by
sexual reproduction and the best optimized cells to propagate by asexual reproduction.

References:

 Ingold (2012) The biology of fungi.

[Link]
id=t5xfBgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
 Hibbett et al. (1997) Evolution of gilled mushrooms and puffballs inferred from ribosomal
DNA sequences. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states
of America.
[Link]
 Loron et al. (2019) Early fungi from the Proterozoic era in Arctic Canada. Nature.
[Link]
 Heitman (2006) Sexual Reproduction and the Evolution of Microbial Pathogens. Current
Biology.
[Link]
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Further Reading

 All Organelle Content

 The Endoplasmic Reticulum and Golgi Body: What’s the Difference?

Last Updated: Nov 17, 2021

Currently rated 4.0 by 42 people

 Written by
Michael Greenwood
Michael graduated from the University of Salford with a Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 2023, and has keen
research interests towards nanotechnology and its application to biological systems. Michael has
written on a wide range of science communication and news topics within the life sciences and
related fields since 2019, and engages extensively with current developments in journal publications.
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