Latest Fungus Stories

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Your skin is literally covered with almost 200 different kinds of fungi. This isn’t the scene out of some twisted horror movie – it’s the conclusion of a team of American researchers who recently created a topographic map of fungi typically found on living human skin. To create their map, scientists from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) used genetic sequencing...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Climate change could cause parasites such as tapeworms to become more infectious or malignant, researchers from Oakland University and the University of South Florida claim in a new study gauging the impact of temperature swings on frogs' fungal infection rates. The research, which was published in Monday's edition of the journal Nature Climate Change, shows that tiny parasitic organisms likely have an easier time adapting to...

The opportunistic fungal pathogen Candida albicans inconspicuously lives in our bodies until it senses that we are weak, when it quickly adapts to go on the offensive. The fungus, known for causing yeast and other minor infections, also causes a sometimes-fatal infection known as candidemia in immunocompromised patients. An in vivo study, published in mBio, demonstrates how C. albicans can distinguish between a healthy and an unhealthy host and alter its physiology to attack. “The...

Researchers address great uncertainties in number of species and emphasize the use of technology to accelerate the rate of species discovery Most of the world's species are still unknown to science although many researchers grappled to address the question of how many species there are on Earth over the recent decades. Estimates of non-microbial diversity on Earth provided by researchers range from 2 million to over 50 million species, with great uncertainties in numbers of insects, fungi,...

As mushrooms evolve to live symbiotically with trees, they give up parts of their DNA associated with decomposing cellulose, Harvard researchers find Harvard researchers are unlocking the evolutionary secrets of one of the world's most recognizable groups of mushrooms, and to do it, they're using one of the most comprehensive fungal "family trees" ever created. As reported in paper published July 18 in PLoS ONE, Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Anne Pringle and...

The word rainforest usually conjures up visions of brightly colored birds and hyperactive monkeys swooping through a thick green canopy of leaves, vines and flowers.  But rainforests are also found closer to the poles, in the northern or boreal region where temperatures are far cooler. And while there are no monkeys swinging through the trees here, these forests are every bit as endangered as their southern cousins, and highly diverse – if you know where to look. Olga Hilmo knows. As a...

New biogeochemical understanding of manganese oxidation lends insight to environmental remediation Harvard-led researchers have discovered that an Ascomycete fungus that is common in polluted water produces environmentally important minerals during asexual reproduction. The key chemical in the process, superoxide, is a byproduct of fungal growth when the organism produces spores. Once released into the environment, superoxide reacts with the element manganese (Mn), producing a highly...

Scientists are reporting new evidence that a white rot fungus shows promise in the search for a way to use waste corn stalks, cobs and leaves – rather than corn itself – to produce ethanol to extend supplies of gasoline. Their study on using the fungus to break down the tough cellulose and related material in this so-called "corn stover" to free up sugars for ethanol fermentation appears in the ACS' journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. Yebo Li and colleagues explain...

A fungal species native to Iran which attacks grasses is the result of natural hybridisation that occurred just a few hundred years ago Zymoseptoria tritici is often a headache for European farmers. This ascomycete originating from the Middle East attacks the leaves of wheat plants triggering "speckled leaf blotch", which can cut crop yields by up to 50 percent. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg and Aarhus University in Denmark have now taken...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new study suggests that the evolution of a fungus known as white rot may have ended a 60-million-year-long period responsible for coal deposition. Coal deposits that occurred because of the Carboniferous Period, which ended about 300 million years ago, have fueled about 50 percent of U.S. electric power generation as recently as 2010. The research, presented online in the June 29 edition of Science, points to the evolution of...