By Kirsty Jackson (@kjjscience)
As a child I was drawn to fungi. I liked to eat them and I was fascinated by the way they seemed to pop up out of the grass. Like a lot of people I grew up thinking that fungi were a type of plant. After all they come out of the ground or trees, are a variety of different shapes and colours and are relatively inanimate. It wasn’t until my early teens, in my science classes, that I learned that fungi were a type of living thing separate from plants and animals. At university I discovered that fungi are actually closer in evolutionary history to animals than they are plants.
Fungi in fact have a biological kingdom all of their own. There are 7 phyla in the kingdom with the Ascomycota and Basidomycota being the largest. Ascomycetes include the yeast-types and the Basidomycetes contain the mushroom-type and most pathogenic fungi. Glomeromycota are all arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Microsporidia are unicellular parasites, Neocallimastigomycota are anaerobic fungi and Chytridiomycota are mostly aquatic fungi that produce spores that have flagella – similar to bacterial flagella. The evolutionary history of fungi is still under debate and techniques such as ribosomal sequencing are being used to figure it out [1]. I shall mostly be talking about the Ascomycota and the Basidiomycota. Continue reading
Plant Scientist 