The generally positive relationship between biodiversity of groups of directly or indirectly interacting organisms is one of the most important ecological concepts (Gaston, 2000 Nature, 405, 220-227; Scherber C, Eisenhauer N, Weisser WW et al., 2010 Nature, 468, 553-556). In a recent issue of Molecular Ecology, Gao C, Shi N-N, Liu Y-X et al. (2013: 22, 3403-3414) reported that the richness of p...

Multiplayer symbioses are common in nature, but our understanding of the ecological dynamics occurring in complex symbioses is limited. The tripartite mutualism between fungus-growing ants, their fungal cultivars, and antibiotic-producing bacteria exemplifies symbiotic complexity. Here we reveal how black yeasts, newly described symbionts of the ant-microbe system, compromise the efficiency of ...

Albinas Lugauskas, Jiirate Repeckiene, Jurgita Stakeniene Institute of Botany, ZalitU4. ezer4. St. 47, LT-2021 Vilnius, Lithuania, e-mail: [email protected]. [email protected] The diversity of fungi species spread on food products grown and processed under various ecological conditions were estimated during the researches carried out in 1998-2003. Fungi were isolated and identified from ...

In many semi-natural and natural ecosystems, mycorrhizal fungi are the most abundant and functionally important group of soil micro-organisms. They are almost wholly dependent on their host plants to supply them with photosynthate in return for which they enable the plant to access greater quantities of nutrients. Thus, there is considerable potential for plant communities to regulate the struc...

New findings challenge the traditional view of the plant cell wall as passive structural barrier to invasion by fungal microorganisms. A surveillance system for cell wall integrity appears to sense perturbation of the cell wall structure upon fungal attack and is interconnected with known plant defence signalling pathways. Biotrophic fungi might manipulate this surveillance system for the estab...

Comparisons of phylogenetic patterns between coevolving symbionts can reveal rich details about the evolutionary history of symbioses. The ancient symbiosis between fungus-growing ants, their fungal cultivars, antibiotic-producing bacteria and cultivar-infecting parasites is dominated by a pattern of parallel coevolution, where the symbionts of each functional group are members of monophyletic ...

The mutualism between fungus-growing termites (Macrotermitinae) and their mutualistic fungi (Termitomyces) began in Africa. The fungus-growing termites have secondarily colonized Madagascar and only a subset of the genera found in Africa is found on this isolated island. Successful long-distance colonization may have been severely constrained by the obligate interaction of the termites with fun...

Mangrove ecosystem is well known for the productivity. Fungi play an important role in the nutritive cycle and support the mangrove ecosystem. In the present investigation the authors tries to elucidate marine fungi in selected mangrove ecosystem of North Malabar region of Kerala. 30 marine fungi including 19 Ascomycetes, 1 Basidiomycete and 10 Mitosporic fungi were encountered. Backwater suppo...

Epicoccum nigrum is a common mitosporic fungus of the Didymellaceae (Ascomycota) family known for the production of numerous secondary metabolites. Here, we present the 34.7-Mbp draft genome sequence of strain ICMP 19927 assembled from a range of short-insert and long-insert Illumina libraries.

Trichoderma species are known globally mostly for the production of industrially useful enzymes as well as their biocontrol ability against plant pathogens. One of the major strategies of biological control is mycoparasitism against fungal pathogens of crop plants. However, till recently the mechanisms of mycoparasitism by biocontrol potential Trichoderma species at molecular level were not cle...