Mushrooms are closer kin to you than to the plants they grow beside
For centuries botanists filed fungi alongside mosses and ferns. DNA told another story: the kingdom that gives us bread yeast, penicillin and truffles split from animals and plants roughly a billion years ago and sits nearer to us. Only about 148,000 species have names, perhaps a twentieth of the true total.
What sets fungi apart starts with the wall around each cell. It combines chitin, the tough material of insect shells, with glucans also found in plants, a pairing no other living thing uses, and it contains no cellulose. Fungi cannot photosynthesise. Like animals they need ready-made food, which they get by leaking digestive enzymes into their surroundings and absorbing what dissolves. Their only way of moving, spores aside, is simply to grow.
Most fungal bodies are threads called hyphae that lengthen at their tips, forming hidden networks in soil or rotting wood; yeasts instead live as single cells that bud or divide. Armillaria builds root-like cords to shuttle water. Over one hundred species glow in the dark, some survive radiation or deep-sea sediments, and chytrid fungi that swim as spores have driven a worldwide decline in frogs and salamanders.
The rest of life leans heavily on them. Fungi are the chief recyclers of dead matter, and more than 90 percent of plants depend on partnerships with fungi at their roots. People have long eaten mushrooms, raised bread and brewed beer and soy sauce with them, and since the 1940s have drawn antibiotics from them. The darker side includes toxins, crop blights such as rice blast, and at least 300 species that can infect humans.
The Latin word fungus meant mushroom and traces back to the Greek for sponge, while mycology, the study of fungi, took its name from the Greek mykes. Estimates published in 2017 put the kingdom at 2.2 to 3.8 million species, and a record 2,905 new ones were described in 2020. In August 2021 an IUCN species commission asked conservationists to speak of fauna, flora and funga.
Source: Fungus
