image: This is a "sulphur shelf" mushroom Laetiporus sulphureus. This is a brown rot species that decays cellulose while leaving lignin intact. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the June 29, 2012, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by Dimitrios Floudas at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and colleagues was titled, "The Paleozoic Origin of Enzymatic Lignin Decomposition Reconstructed from 31 Fungal Genomes." view more
Credit: [Image courtesy of A. Justo and D. Floudas]