Scientists have found a 'tipping point' in the evolution of fungi that throttles their growth and sculpts their shapes. The findings demonstrate how small changes in environmental factors can lead to huge changes in evolutionary outcomes.
Scientists have found a 'tipping point' in the evolution of fungi that throttles their growth and sculpts their shapes. The findings demonstrate how small changes in environmental factors can lead to huge changes in evolutionary outcomes.
Although fungi often bring to mind mushroom caps, fungi also have underground"roots" called mycelia. Mycelia are made up of thousands of interconnected, microscopic, finger-like cells called hyphae that grow into vast networks. Hyphae worm their way through the soil by growing from their tips. To do so, they inflate themselves, similar to the long balloons used to make balloon animals.
To understand the reasons for different shapes of hyphae, Rojas and his colleagues combined theory and experiments to investigate fungi and water molds from across nature. They first employed physics-based models of inflationary tip growth to determine allThe researchers hypothesized that the limited shapes observed in nature reflected"survival of the fittest," and that the many possible shapes not observed in real fungi were, for some reason, weaker evolutionary rejects.
However, Rojas's team found that fitness landscapes can be much more rich than a system of peaks and valleys. In fact, they found that the fitness landscape for hyphae contained an overhanging cliff, or tipping point, and that this acts as a barrier to evolution, strongly limiting the shapes of fungal hyphae. Accordingly, they predicted that hyphae with shapes near the brink of the tipping point would be particularly vulnerable to small environmental, chemical, or genetic changes.
The researchers believe that their results have critical implications for our understanding of many ecological and evolutionary systems. For example, those species whose evolution is subject to a tipping point may be the most vulnerable to the gradual increase in temperature caused by climate change. Their findings could also aid in the development of new antimicrobials against disease-causing fungi by identifying vulnerabilities in their growth associated with an evolutionary tipping point.
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