News by Subject Biology

Lichens -- a combo of fungus and algae -- can grow on bare rocks, so scientists thought that lichens were some of the first organisms to make their way onto land from the water, changing the planet's atmosphere and paving the way for modern plants. But a closer look at the DNA of the algae and fungi that form lichens shows that lichens likely evolved millions of years after plants.

A recent Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions article studies chitin-binding proteins from a soilborne fungus (Verticillium nonalfalfae) that causes vascular wilt in plants. This fungus binds a particular protein (VnaChtBP) to chitin in order to abolish the host plant's chitin-triggered burst of reactive oxygen species and shield the fungus from being digested by the plant.

Corn is a staple feed and biofuel crop with a value close to $3.7 billion in the Michigan economy alone. However, knowledge about seedling pathogens in Michigan corn fields is limited. A group of scientists at Michigan State University set out to gain a better understanding of the composition of seedling pathogens, with results that will aid disease management research not only in corn but in rotational crops such as soybean and wheat.

A new software tool called Fungal Feature Tracker could accelerate understanding of fungal morphology and growth. Guillermo Vidal-Diez de Ulzurrun and colleagues in the laboratory led by Yen-Ping Hsueh at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, present the tool in PLOS Computational Biology.

Tricking fungi into thinking they're starving could be the key to slowing down our evolutionary arms race with fungal pathogens, as hungry fungi don't want to have sex.

A first deep dive into the diversity of marine fungi and their cell division cycles has been published by a collaborative team at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, revealing unusual cell cycles, cell division patterns, and polarity. The study broadens our knowledge of ocean diversity into the nearly unstudied Kingdom Fungi.

Introducing fungi to wheat boosted their uptake of key nutrients and could lead to new, 'climate smart' varieties of crops, according to a new study.