"Fungi"

Extant chytrid species also occur in terrestrial environments as plant pathogenic fungi, soil fungi, and even as anaerobic inhabitants of the guts of herbivores such as cows (all Neocallimastigomycota).

Both animals and fungi have spores or gametes with a single smooth, posteriorly inserted flagellum, but only species of the basal chytrid phyla have retained this primitive character (Barr, 1992; Cavalier-Smith, 1987, 1995).

... and concatenated protein-coding genes (Steenkamp et al., ...

For example, the species Hyaloraphidium curvatum was assumed to be a green alga that had adopted a heterotrophic lifecycle concomitantly with losing its chloroplast.

Molecular characters have been essential for phylogenetic analysis in cases when morphological characters are convergent, reduced, or missing among the taxa considered.

In some low nitrogen environments several independent groups of fungi have adaptations such as nooses and sticky knobs with which to trap and degrade nematodes and other small animals.

Rather than requiring a stomach to accomplish digestion, fungi live in their own food supply and simply grow into new food as the local environment becomes nutrient depleted.

The air we breathe is filled with spores of species that are air dispersed.

Fungi are characterized by non-motile bodies (thalli) constructed of apically elongating walled filaments (hyphae), a life cycle with sexual and asexual reproduction, usually from a common thallus, haploid thalli resulting from zygotic meiosis, and heterotrophic nutrition.

This finding is significant because Nuclearia lacks a cell wall and has phagotrophic nutrition in which the food source (such as a bacterium or algal cell) is engulfed wholly, unlike fungi and microsporidia which utilize absorptive nutrition.

Fungi are characterized by non-motile bodies (thalli) constructed of apically elongating walled filaments (hyphae), a life cycle with sexual and asexual reproduction, usually from a common thallus, haploid thalli resulting from zygotic meiosis, and heterotrophic...

Although lichens may seem infrequent in polluted cities, they can form the dominant vegetation in nordic environments, and there is a better than 80% chance that any plant you find is mycorrhizal.

Although we normally think of fungi as growing in warm, moist forests, many species occur in habitats that are cold, periodically arid, or otherwise seemingly inhospitable.

1993), unique and shared sequence insertions in proteins such as elongation factor 1α (Baldauf and Palmer, 1993), entire mitochondrial genomes (Lang et al., ...

The organisms of the fungal lineage include mushrooms, rusts, smuts, puffballs, truffles, morels, molds, and yeasts, as well as many less well-known organisms (Alexopoulos et al., ...

When one of the filaments contacts a food supply, the entire colony mobilizes and reallocates resources to exploit the new food.

More interesting for mycologists are the findings that some species previously considered protozoa are actually Fungi.

It is important to recognize that optimum conditions for growth and reproduction vary widely with fungal species.

These usually are species that produce large numbers of spores, and examples include many species pathogenic on agricultural crops and trees.

Exceptions to this characterization of fungi are well known, and include the following: Most species of chytrids have cells with a single, smooth, posteriorly inserted flagellum at some stage in the life cycle, and centrioles are associated with nuclear division.

As the sister group of animals and part of the eukaryotic crown group that radiated about a billion years ago, the fungi constitute an independent group equal in rank to that of plants and animals.

Although many saprobic and plant pathogenic species with low substrate specificity and effective dispersal systems have broad distributions, gene flow appears to be restricted in many fungi.

Humans, for example, may succumb to diseases caused by Pneumocystis (a type of pneumonia that affects individuals with supressed immune systems), Coccidioides (valley fever), Ajellomyces (blastomycosis and histoplasmosis), and Cryptococcus (cryptococcosis) (Kwon-Chung and Bennett, 1992).

The large cavities eaten out of living trees by wood-decaying fungi provide nest holes for a variety of animals, and extinction of the ivory billed woodpecker was due in large part to loss, through human activity, of nesting trees in bottom land hardwoods.