New kind of fungi found

[Nahtmmm]

Or IS it fungi?

A new paper published in Nature magazine suggests that biologists in the U.K. have discovered an entirely new and unique branch in the tree of life.

A group of mysterious microscopic organisms related to fungus are actually so different that they make up their own kind of fungal group, the biologists said.

Another way to say that: There are so many of these distinctly different kinds of organisms living in so many diverse places that the biodiversity among this new group might be as vast as the entire known fungal kingdom.

In fact, they might not actually be fungi at all.

The scientists who have discovered this new "clade" -- a branch on the tree of life that consists of an organism and all of its descendants -- have named it cryptomycota, which loosely means "hidden from the kingdom Fungi."

And indeed the cryptomycota have remained hidden from sight even though it turns out they are everywhere, living in many different environments, including freshwater lakes and sediments, as well as pond water.

While biologists estimate that they've only categorized and cataloged about 10 percent of all fungi in the world, they were pretty sure that they'd discovered all the major groups. Cryptomycota is so new and biologically different than other fungi that scientists have yet to characterized its life cycle precisely -- which is reasonable considering this is the first time researchers have ever knowingly studied them as a completely different clade.

As such, there are a lot of questions surrounding cryptomycota. How did they evolve to survive in so many diverse environments? Does their life cycle involve developing a cell wall, or do they acquire a cell wall parasitically? And, possibly, are cryptomycota fundamentally fungi at all, or are they something completely different?

Answering questions like those is going to take a lot of time, a lot of research, a lot of papers, and likely a lot of argument in the global biological community. If an entirely new taxonomical kingdom is established and it turns out everything you learned in high school was significantly incomplete, we'll certainly let you know.

[Santaman]

Cool

[RJDiogenes]

Wow. Not just a new species of fungi, but a whole new clade. It's fantastic that such great discoveries can still be made.

I just hope it's not the Fungi from Yuggoth.

[huggle]

I think we'll propably be facing similar discoveries in the near future. A few of these cryptomorpha were already known but listed under different divisions. That's a problem that roots in the classical method of grouping organisms according to their looks or some physiological peculiarities. Only comperatively lately, for about 20 years now, gene sequencing has become cheap and simple enough to be used regularly to determine the family relations of organisms.

The same method proved a few years ago that Diatoms are in fact no algae as had been assumed for centuries, based on the fact that they have chlorophyll, but actually are a close relative of the bluegreen algae which in turn are no algae either but a special kind of bacteria.

Confusing, isn't it? (Currently we believe there are archaebacteria, "modern" bacteria, bluegreen algae, diatoms - as a kind of link between bacteria and algae - and then the "real" algae. But that order might have changed by tomorrow morning )

It'll take a while till the geneticists will get the world sorted out properly.



Btw, recent genetical analysis showed that humans and monkeys don't have a common ancestors but that humans are a spinoff of the Chimpanzee's ancestor, with the other primate species having split off previousely. So Darwin wasn't all that wrong after all.

[RJDiogenes]

Personally, I think it's something that escaped from that Japanese probe that crashed.

[huggle]

Or it's a case like with the Anthrax bacteria shortly after 9/11 that were sent to several US-offices in form of a whitish powder. Everyone thought it was a terrorist act (Bin Laden was blamed for it) and then after half a year it turned out it was sent from the boss of an US bio-weapon lab who was furious with the government because his funds had got cut back.

No, just kidding. So far nobody uses mushrooms for military purposes. I think these funghi are of a perfectly natural origin and have simply been overlooked all this time due to their tiny size. At 1-1.5 µm they are smaller than your average Escherichia coli and at the lower margin of what you can see through a microscope. And who'd bother to examine tiny bacteria-like thingies under an electron microscope? It'd be way too expensive for a just-for-fun examination.

[RJDiogenes]

I meant the probe that brought samples back from an asteroid. They could be little wee invaders from outer space.

[huggle]

I doubt they could survive here. Practically every organism on this planet lives of killing all others. Invaders wouldn't get a chance to develop any defenses before they got eaten by something.

[RJDiogenes]

That would make a very short movie.

[huggle]

not really. Just think of the "Alien" movies. The plot is always the same: alien predaoor hatches on board a space ship, eats most of the crew and finally gets killed by the tough female crew member. A 2-line story stretched out to 3 movies (or 4 even?). It's all just a matter of writing enough fillers between the few bits of plot-relevant action.

[RJDiogenes]

Nude scenes. That would do it.

[huggle]

true, but it would cause restrictions with the sales. Without nude scenes you can make more money from it. Usually they solve the prob by inserting flashbacks (cheap, as you can use snippets of film from the previous episodes) or bar scenes (cheap as you can use old props).

[SpaceBall]

So they found my socks ... now how do I get them back?


Still pretty cool but not so special if you think of all the plants or other critters we already burned away in the amazon.

[huggle]

not just there. Over here as well. In Germany even the sparrows were on the Red List for a few years. They have recovered a bit now and were taken off the list again last year but still it's creepy that they ever were on it.

[RJDiogenes]

We are in the midst of a terrible global mass extinction event.

[huggle]

indeed. Only the species that really would deserve extinction (politicians, bullies, burglars, tax controllers and those people who spam us with viagra ads) seem to propagate like rabbits