0000000001166133
AUTHOR
Eleonora Egidi
Biodiversity, evolution and adaptation of fungi in exstreme environments
Fungi play irreplaceable roles for ecosystem functioning. They may adopt different life styles, for example saprotrophs, symbionts or parasites: some species are cosmopolitan with a wide distribution and others, thanks to they ecological plasticity, may adapt to harsh environments precluded to most of life forms. In stressing conditions, their role is even more crucial for the recycling of organic matter or favouring nutrients uptake. When the conditions become really extreme and competion is low, fungi focus on extremotollerance and evolve peculiar competences to exploit natural or xenobiotic resources in the particular constraints imposed by the environment. This paper focuses on three di…
Symbiotic status alters fungal eco‐evolutionary offspring trajectories
Despite host-fungal symbiotic interactions being ubiquitous in all ecosystems, understanding how symbiosis has shaped the ecology and evolution of fungal spores that are involved in dispersal and colonization of their hosts has been ignored in life-history studies. We assembled a spore morphology database covering over 26,000 species of free-living to symbiotic fungi of plants, insects and humans and found more than eight orders of variation in spore size. Evolutionary transitions in symbiotic status correlated with shifts in spore size, but the strength of this effect varied widely among phyla. Symbiotic status explained more variation than climatic variables in the current distribution of…