Fungus-farming ants around the world cultivate essentially the same fungus and are not as critical to the reproduction of the fungi as previously believed, biologists at The University of Texas at ...

Saprotrophic fungi are obliged to spend energy on growth, reproduction, and substrate digestion. To understand the trade-offs involved, we developed a model that, for any given growth rate, identifies ...

New light has been shed on a fascinating phenomenon of the natural world -- the ability of some species to reproduce sexually without a partner. When sex occurs the fungus activates its internal ...

Powdery mildew is one of the most dreaded plant diseases: The parasitic fungus afflicts crops such as wheat and barley and is responsible for large harvest shortfalls every year. Beat Keller and ...

Sexual reproduction is a common attribute of eukaryotes owing to its potential to generate variability among individuals and to provide an advantage over species that are strictly asexual. Human ...

The Pro1 protein helps express mating-related genes in different species of fungi. But what happens when Pro1 malfunctions? Researchers from the Tokyo University of Science have found that mutations ...

Figure 1: Sorting of variants of a polymorphic marker in single-spore cultures of Glomus. To distinguish between these two models, we devised three approaches. First, we investigated maintenance of ...

A fungal parasite that infects ants and manipulates their behavior to benefit the fungus' reproduction accomplishes this feat without infecting the ants' brains, according to a study led by Penn State ...