Kingdom Fungi

Features and Characteristics of Fungi Kingdom

• Fungi are eukaryotic organisms.
• They are non-motile.
• Fungi are heterotrophic organisms.
• Nutrition in fungi is saprophytic, or parasitic or symbiotic.
• They are non-vascular.
• They reproduce by means of spores called conidia or sporangiospores or zoospores.
• Depending on the species and conditions both sexual and asexual spores may be produced.
• Exhibit the phenomenon of alternation of generation.
• The vegetative body of the fungi may be unicellular or composed of microscopic threads called hyphae. The network of hyphae is known as mycelium.
• The structure of cell wall is similar to plants but chemically the fungal cell wall is composed of chitin.
• They digest the food first and then ingest the food. To accomplish, it produces enzymes.
• Biosynthesis of chitin occurs in fungi.
• Store their food as starch.
• The nucleus of the fungi is very small.
• During mitosis, the nuclear envelope is not dissolved.
• Reproduction in fungi occurs both by asexual and sexual. The asexual state is referred to as anamorph and the sexual state is called as teleomorph

Classification of Kingdom Fungi

Ascomycetes

• Mostly Multicellular (Ex Penicillium) and Rarely Unicellular(Ex- Yeast)
• They are saprophytic(feed on dead organisms) or parasitic(feed on living things)
• Buffles and Morels are edible and eaten as delicacies in some part of the world.

Basidiomycetes

• They are Parasites.
• Grow in the soil as well as in Tree logs.
• Reproduction is vegetative reproduction by fragmentation.
• Common Members are Algeciras(Mushroom), Puccinia(Rust Fungus), and Ustilago(Smut)

Deuteromycetes

• An organism is placed in this group when its reproduction mode is not known. Once the sexual stages of the fungi are known, it is either moved to ascomycetes or basidiomycetes.
• Most of the Members are decomposers of litter and few members are saprophytes or parasites.
• Common Members of this group are Trichoderma Alternaria and Colletotrichum

Phycomycetes

• Live in Aquatic Habitats and on decaying wood.
• Asexual Reproduction using zoospores(motile) or aplanospores(non-motile)
• Common members are Mucor, Rhizopus, Albugo

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In this video, I’m going to talk about Kingdom Fungi. The fungus is a pretty diverse group. It contains organisms that you’re familiar with like the mushroom but it also contains organisms that are much smaller than that like a yeast which is going to be single-celled fungi.

They form sometimes symbiotic relationships so lichen, for example, is a symbiotic relationship between fungi and then algae and so not only do they break down a decomposed material but they’re also going to serve another role working symbiotically with both algae and then plants to allow them to function better.

If we look at their phylogeny so this is the eukaryotes so we’re going to talk about things that have a nucleus and have organelles and you can find here that here’s our fungi in other words when we try to classify all eukaryotes we’re going to put them right here. If you look at animals, they are going to be right here so what does this mean. Well we’re going to share more recent common ancestry with fungi than we are with plants which are going to be way back here because we put green plants way over on this side and so we probably have more in common with a fungi especially the way we live our life than we do with green plants but we’re not directly related to them.

We get this from The Tree of Life project and so you can see that we have this break off like this and there are monophyletic groups. In other words, there’s going to be some groups that you should know because we know that these things all share the common ancestry and they’re one group. There are going to be five of those chytridiomycota, Zygomycota, glomerulamycota, Ascomycota, and Basidiomycota.

These are ones that you do need to know because they’re monophyletic and they’re important when we’re studying biology but before we get there let’s get to the characteristics of fungi. They’re eukaryotic so they’ve got nuclei and organelles. They’re heterotrophs they originally were classified as plants and you can see why it almost looks like a plant. They don’t move they don’t run around like animals and they almost have these root-like structures that look like plant roots.

We used to classify them as plants but they’re not, they eat and they’re going to digest the material. I’ll show you some cool examples of that in just a second they have cell walls so that separates them from us also the fact that they don’t move and the cell walls are made of the polysaccharide called chitin, the exoskeleton of insects are made from that similar structure.

Most of the inside of the structure is actually going to be filamentous. In other words, it’s made of filaments and so this would be the filaments in a mushroom you can see these thin little filaments you can see the cell wall going around the outside of it but they’re not going to have any true tissues. In other words, they’re not going to have for example muscle tissue, your nervous tissue. It’s just going to be a group of these hyphae they call these that’s what these filaments are called. Even if we were to look in here to these fruiting bodies of these mushrooms we’d find that there – just packed together really really tightly before – look at the roots of them those are going to be – absorbing nutrients.

These are some of the characteristics shared by all fungi they’re all heterotrophic and so if you see one growing out of this tree or this rotting tree they’re digesting the material inside there and they’re eating. You can see here that this mold is kind of a term that just means fast-growing fungi. You can see this mold is breaking down this fruit. If you’ve ever had athlete’s foot you’ve been infected by a fungus as well and so this right here is a fungus growing in between the toes and it’s high fuel actually grow into the tissues of the person’s foot it secretes an enzyme then it digests that material inside and it’s really painful because it’s starting to digest the nerves on the outside of the foot.

One of my favorite fungi of all is this an anthrobotrys basically what they do is you can see the hyphae that they’re growing here but they’ll make these tiny little rings and then when you have a worm like this is called a nematode worm basically if the nematode worm starts to swim through this ring it will cinch tight on the on the nematode worm it’ll grab a hold of it and then it’s going to digest it from the outside in and so this is an animal eating fungi and so what could be much cooler than that.

How do they reproduce well they do reproduce a lot of the time asexually and so when you have mushrooms just continuing to grow out. They can grow relatively quick that’s going to be asexual. They can also have a sexual phase as well and so the spores that come out of a puffball like this are usually going to be asexual spores that can spread to an area where there’s a little bit of water and some food and they can start growing but there’s also sexual portions so these were formed through a sexual process if we look at this mushroom right here basically what you get are this is a basidiomycetes pores that fall down you get the growth of a new mushroom but then we can have sexual reproduction producing more spores and so there’s a variety of ways they reproduce.

At the beginning there are five important phyla that you have to know when it comes to studying fungi and I classified them from A to Z this is just a quick way that I remember it so we’ve got ABC and we’ve got Z over here so we go from A to Z ABC and then we got G in the middle and the G can stand for golly aren’t those fungi cool because these ones are going to be really cool in just a second and so let’s go from A to Z.

The first ones are the Ascomycota. The spores are going to form on the inside of that that’s why we call it the Ascomycota why are these important well this is my favorite fungi of all this is the morels. We like to go hunting them in the spring they taste delicious. They’re really hard to find you’re looking right here at the sexual portion of that but you can see these sacs on the inside of the sack right here but Ascomycota are also important so penicillin is a fungus or an Aescoat that is going to make a lot of the antibiotics that we have and so they’re important for.

If we look at Basidiomycota as the next one, it is going to form spores we’ll have four spores that are found on the name Basidiomycota comes from its club fungi and so what are the big ones these are going to be the mushrooms that we think of when we think of fungi those are going to be Basidiomycota if we look at these two together sometimes we would say these two share common ancestry Ascomycota and Basidiomycota and we sometimes call these the top fungi what’s next is the sea so that’s going to be chytridiomycosis referred to as the chytrids these used to be classified as protists and the reason why is that they have a flagellated stage where they’ll actually swim around we now know that they’re true fungi. You’ve read about these in the news because we’ve seen on the planet huge increases in deaths of frogs and a lot of those are related to chytrid fungus are infecting the frogs.

Let’s go to the G then so the G stands for the glomerulamycota. They are very important because what they’ll do is they form a symbiotic relationship with plants. This is the root of a plant but you can see the fungi growing inside it and almost all plants, in other words, every plant that we look for has these relationships between the glomerulamycota and their roots what does that give them well that gives them increased surface area and it’s allowed them going to take in more water and then they give these fungi a place to live and so it’s a great relationship for both the fungi and for the plant.

The last one is going to be the Zygomycota. This is going to be this resistant structure where the spores are actually formed in it’ll rupture and then we get this on a hiss as the spores are spread out if you look at that a bunch of them together it looks like that and a whole bunch of them together are going to look like this so this is a bread mold Zygo sporangia that you’re familiar with and so basically what happens if you leave some bread out one of these spores is going to land on it and we’re going to get the growth of this fungus what’s the fungus eating it’s eating the bread because that’s what they do their heterotrophs. You remember those five important phyla of fungi Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, chytridiomycota, glomerulamycota, and Zygomycota and they’re all just different types of fungi and fungi serve a huge role on our planet they break down material when it’s dead and dying they recycle those nutrients but they also form these symbiotic relationships with plants and algae.
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