Fungi - module #4

(the mushroom in the pictures is Jase) hehe

In this module we learned about mushrooms, slime molds, yeast we use for baking, and others kinds of fungi we use to flavor cheese, make medicine and others that cause diseases for people and plants. All of these things come from kingdom Fungi

Most Fungi are multicellular, saprophytic or parasitic decomposing heterotrophs! this all means that most of them are made up of more than one cell and live on a dead organism or alive one, and decomposing it making their own food. when a fungus makes it's own food it digests the food out side of their body. this is called extracellular digestion. this allows other plants to absorb some of the nutrients that have been broken down like trees. when a tree drops it's leaves mushrooms will appear around the bottom and start decomposing the leaves, some of the nutrients will be absorbed by the fungus and some by the tree. so the tree can actually absorb broken down chemicals from it own leaves and be reused! if the fungus didn't do this the tree would be choked out by it's own leaves in just a few seasons! fungi brake down things by using mycelium - which is a mat of strands underneath the stalk (the part we eat) we see on

eat) we see on the top. the mycelium is allot bigger than the stalk and is made up of septate or nonseptiate hypha, which are the individual strands of the mycelium. hypha is a filament of fungal calls. septate hypha have cells walls inside with holes in-between each one and they exchange cytoplasm! they are the only kind of organisms that share cytoplasm! nonseptate hpha have no cell walls inside so it's like one big cell. there is also Rhiziod hypha, a hypha that is imbed in the material on which the fungus grows. Aerial hypha is another kind, it sticks up in the air and either absorbs oxygen, produces spores, or asexually reproduces to form new filament. if it produces spores it is called a sporophore if it reproduces asexually to make filaments it is called a stolon. both of these are a way to make more fungus. the last one is a Haustorium hypha it is a parasitic fungus that enters the host's cells and absorbs nutrition directly from the cytoplasm, this is of course parasitic.

Fungus are classaified into phylums by the what there fruiting bodies (the things above the ground) look like and how they reproduce. here are the phyla:

Basidiomycota - club like spores called basidia

Ascomycota - sac like spores called asci

Zygomcyota - spores were hypha fuse (when 2 hypha run into each other and grow together)

Chytridiomycota - spores with flagella

Deuteromycota - with no known methods of sexual reproduction

Myxomycota - fungi that look like protozoa for much of there lives

Mushrooms, puff balls, shelf fungi, rusts, and smuts come form Basidiomycota. the last 3 being parasitic. yeast is in phylum Ascomycota - yeast we learned is used for baking bread and making alcohol drinks. when the yeast is mixed into the bread dough it starts to feed on the sugars in the bead, this brakes it down into alcohol and carbon dioxide. the carbon dioxide makes the dough rise and the alcohol kills the yeast and then evaporates. the yeast is killed when the alcohol reaches 4 % . other yeast can stand up to 12% but when people want more than a 12% alcohol level in alcoholic drinks they have to do distillation. Distillation is when they boil the water the alcohol is in and since the alcohol boils of at a lower temp then water, they can collect the vapors and then create a solution with higher concentration levels. single celled fungi called chytrids are in Chytridiomycota, mold comes from phylum Zygomycota and penicillin and antibiotics come from Deuteromycota. last of all slime molds and things that look like protozoa for some of there life are placed in Myxomycota.

lastly we learned that lots and lots of mushrooms and poisonous- example: the destroying angle mushroom, it's white and when you eat it, it tastes like a normal tasty mushroom, the drawback is that in 16 hours you'll be dead!!! so only eat mushrooms from the store! :)

we have also developed a hypothesis, (i don't how educated it is but it's a guess)

that Lahonti, might have been poisoned by degrees by mushrooms! :D our only thought supporting our guess though is that there's allot of mushrooms in south america. yea thats it - but hey it's a scientific guess made by sortof scientific student scientists and there awesome Bio Domin!!

- Tameanea