Comments on: The Hidden Fungi

By: kati

kati — Fri, 27 May 2011 17:21:09 +0000

SO FANTASTIC. i don’t know what else to do but use all caps. :) makes me wonder about so many things! and just like vasha, this is the kind of topic (and lovely writing) that makes your blog one of my absolute favorites. and i tell so many people about it. mostly i get a lot of funny looks wondering why this mom of two has a “favorite fungi/biodiversity blog” -ha!

and vincent, you bring up so many good points, too! reading all this, i pretty much just assume that not finding anything in the seawater just means we haven’t found whatever it is we don’t know to look for yet. this planet is crawling with fun stuff! if i could turn my bonus room into a serious amateur lab, i totally would! haha!

By: ResearchBlogging.org News » Blog Archive » Editor’s Selections: Sex is for fighting parasites, the hidden fungi, and microbial communities in the deep sea

Fri, 27 May 2011 16:04:12 +0000

[…] are apparently very wrong. Deep genome sequencing of environmental samples has revealed that the fungal tree of life is far bigger than previously […]

By: Vincent Racaniello

Vincent Racaniello — Fri, 27 May 2011 00:22:51 +0000

The same has happened in the viral world. We have missed many viruses because they cannot be cultured. Try to plate sea water on E. coli and you won’t get much in the way of plaques; sequence the water, and you find one million phages per ml. The same goes for rhinoviruses, agents of the common cold. We knew of 100 culturable rhinoviruses until sequencing of snot revealed another 150. And to think I spend one year sequencing a 7.5 kb viral genome in 1981!

By: Jennifer Frazer

Jennifer Frazer — Wed, 25 May 2011 03:28:16 +0000

So far the the ones they’ve probed have all stained unicellular. But their probes only sampled a small fraction of the group, so who knows what the rest are like. To answer your second question, yes. Many of the most basal fungi — the chytrids — are unicellular for most or all of their life too. Of course, they have chitinous cell walls.

Slime molds, as usual, are off in left field in the Amoebozoa; see here for one conservative tree.

Sorry for the delay in responding — just got back today from my talk in the Springs!

By: Ben Taft

Ben Taft — Tue, 24 May 2011 19:26:55 +0000

I am going to be lazy and not RTFA. How likely is it that these cryptomycetes are multicellular? If not, is it likely that the organisms in this group are the unicellular closest relatives to fungi, in much the same way that choanoflagellates are/may be the closest unicellular relatives to animals? That would solve the nomenclature issues and return us to the status quo of there are a lot of more-or-less-unicellular heterotrophs that do weird stuff . It still opens up exciting possibilities about understanding one of the origins of multicellularity. Where do slime ‘molds’ fit in in this phylogeny?

By: Vasha

Vasha — Tue, 24 May 2011 02:45:25 +0000

I just spent some time searching the web for other stories about this, and most of them are pretty poor, even dragging out the term "missing link"; but there's one more good blog post at Southern Fried Science. Plus, the German news article at Spektrum der Wissenschaft is rather better than most of the English-language ones.

By: Vasha

Vasha — Tue, 24 May 2011 00:54:47 +0000

Wonderful news — things like this keep me eagerly reading your blog.