Small Things Considered

Fungomania II. The Humongousest Fungus

by Elio | We dealt with a monster fossil fungus before. In the interest of expediency, let me reprint part of what I said: "Several museums pos­sess specimens of a cylindrical organism named Prototaxites  whose tree-like trunks measure up to 8 meters long by 1 meter wide. Protota­xites  dated from approximately 420 to 350 million... Read more →

Fungomania I. The Yeast and the Bee.

by Elio | Fungomania returns… In keeping with what we did a year ago, we offer three consecutive fungal posts. I have earlier professed sharing with many a fascination for symbioses (see here). I still don’t know why this is, perhaps it’s simply because multiple genomes interacting are more exciting than one. Read more →

Who Dares Doubt The Decomposing Powers Of Fungi?

by David Lipson | Apparently, it is widely accepted that it took fungi 120 million years to figure out how to decompose woody plants. Hence lignin-rich materials accumulated along with the appearance of widespread forests in the Carboniferous Period, which led to huge coal deposits until white rot fungi finally caught up... Read more →

Fine Reading: Unearthing the Roots ofEctomycorrhizal Symbioses

by Elio | This is a primer on the mycorrhizae, the association of plant roots and fungi. An outstanding review article on this subject has recently appeared, authored by four Frenchmen and one American: F. Martin, A. Kohler, C. Murat, C. Veneault-Fourrey, and D. S. Hibbett. I found reading it both exciting and illuminating, and a good way to conclude this »Fungomania« series. Read more →

If You Were a Carpenter Ant

by Roberto | If you were a Carpenter ant (Camponotus leonardi ) in a rainforest in Thailand, your nest would be built high atop the canopy and, as a worker, you would seldom venture down to the ground during your foraging trips. Somehow, perhaps for the presence of eerie-looking ant graveyards, you are hesitant to go along the path on the forest floor... Read more →

Making Like a Flower

by Elio | The Fungi have an intense obsession with spreading their spores far and wide. Accordingly, many mushrooms make spores by the millions, giant puffballs by the billions. Most of the spores have little chance to succeed, but there is safety in numbers (a strategy not unlike that of the vertebrate males seeking reproduction). Read more →

Fungi, The Tillers

by Elio | "The fossil record of life's earliest steps onto land is pro­found­ly incomplete."  So starts a paper by Cambridge University's Martin Smith that helps shed light on this momentous happening. The climb ashore took place about 500 million years ago, give or take (no one seems to be quite sure of the date). These successful adventurers were plants, but still far from the highly-evolved plants... Read more →

Did the Neanderthals Eat Mushrooms?

by Elio | A recent report in Nature carries the tantalizing title “Neanderthal behaviour, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculus.” A consortium of some 30 authors from about a dozen countries studied the dental plaque of five Neanderthals, two found in caves in Belgium, two in Spain, and one in Italy. Read more →

Raindrops Keep Falling On Their Heads (Thanks To Mushroom Spores, That Is)

by Elio | I have two purposes in discussing a recent paper from the lab of mycologist Nik Money. One is to present a notion of the way mushroom spores may contribute significantly to rain making. The other one is introduce a noteworthy wrinkle in electron microscopy... Read more →

Your Operating System on a Thumbdrive – A Snippet

by Christoph Weigel | At the heart of every cell's 'operating system' you find the ribosomes, these ingenious nano‑machines that translate messenger RNA (mRNA) into all kinds of proteins the cell needs to build and maintain itself. Ribosomes were first described by the electron-microscopist George Palade in a paper from 1955, in which he ponders on... Read more →