Beatrix Potter studied fungi as well as writing about Peter Rabbit
The creator of Peter Rabbit made serious contributions to the study of fungi. She joined a field that was long filed under botany, until a 1969 discovery showed fungi are closer relatives of animals than of plants. Mycology now covers everything from bread yeast to the blight behind Ireland's Great Famine.
Mycology, from the Greek mukes for fungus, studies fungi: their classification, genetics, chemistry and uses. The words mycology and mycologist are usually credited to M. J. Berkeley in 1836, though Robert Kaye Greville used mycologist in 1823. Because most plant diseases are caused by fungi, the field overlaps heavily with plant pathology. Pioneers include Elias Magnus Fries and Heinrich Anton de Bary, and Pier Andrea Saccardo compiled the Sylloge Fungorum, a catalogue of every name used for mushrooms, and sorted imperfect fungi by spore colour and shape.
Interest in mushrooms goes far back. Euripides wrote about them, Theophrastus treated them as plants lacking certain organs, and Pliny the Elder described truffles. In 1245 the Chinese scholar Chen Renyu produced the Junpu, one of the oldest known mushroom books. Pier Antonio Micheli's Nova plantarum genera, published in Florence in 1737, opened the modern era, and Linnaeus gave fungi two-part names in 1753, lumping every stalked gilled mushroom into Agaricus. The field mushroom still carries its Linnaean name, Agaricus campestris. Fungus-hunting outings are called forays after an 1868 outing by the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club.
Fungi keep ecosystems running. They partner with tree roots as mycorrhizae, form lichens, and break down tough lignin in wood and even petroleum, which makes them central to the carbon cycle. Timber production depends on those root partnerships. Some, such as Trichoderma, are used to fight crop diseases in place of chemicals, while others are destructive, including the wheat stem rust Puccinia graminis. The Irish potato blight was caused by Phytophthora infestans, a water mould long grouped with fungi.
People have exploited fungi for millennia. Fermentation, used over 13,000 years ago in what is now Israel, is among the oldest ways of preserving food. More than 500 yeast species are cultivated, above all Saccharomyces cerevisiae for baking, brewing and winemaking, and lager accounts for about 90 percent of the world's beer.
Source: Mycology
