According to a University of Alberta-led research team, about 600 seemingly disparate fungi have been shown to have a common ancestor.
You can say they belong to the same group with the naked eye, because they don't have any special features. Toby Spribille is the principal investigator on the project and a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences.
These are the platypus and echidna of the world.
Australia's famed Linnaean classification system-defying monotremes, which produce milk and have nipples, but lay eggs, were the subject of debate as to whether they were actually real.
It's similar because they all look completely different.
The new class of fungi, called Lichinomycetes, descended from a single origin 300 million years before the extinction of dinosaurs, according to the team's findings.
The research done by David Daz-Escandn shows that the fungi were sprinkled across seven different classes.
He worked with a team of researchers from seven countries to get material from the fungi and discovered that all classes but one descended from a single origin.
They were classified, but people didn't know they were related to each other.
Earth tongues, which shoot up vertically out of the ground, are one of the different forms of these fungi. The driest non-polar desert in the world is South America's Atacama Desert.
Spribille says that even though the fungi look different, they have a lot in common. Nobody knew this was coming.
The team predicts that this group of fungi depend on other organisms for their survival because of their small genomes.
Spribille said that the small genomes mean that the class of fungi have lost a lot of their ability to integrate complexCarbohydrates. When we look at the fungi again, we see they are in a kind ofycorrhizal relationship.
The new research will be important to the study of the evolution of fungi and how they inherit important biotechnological features.
The new group may be able to provide new information about the past.
It's likely that the diversity we see today is just the beginning of the bigger picture. We don't have a lot of examples of this.
The research can be found in the journal.
Toby Spribille is the author of Current Biology. There is an article in the journalcub.2022.11.014.
Journal information: Current Biology
All Rights Reserved © 2024
