Premise: Southern Africa is a biodiversity hotspot rich in endemic plants and lichen-forming fungi. However, species-level data about lichen photobionts in this region are minimal. We focused on Trebouxia (Chlorophyta), the most common lichen photobiont, to understand how southern African species fit into the global biodiversity of this genus and are distributed across biomes and mycobiont partners.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding how symbiotic associations differ across environmental gradients is key to predicting the fate of symbioses as environments change, and it is vital for detecting global reservoirs of symbiont biodiversity in a changing world. However, sampling of symbiotic partners at the full-biome scale is difficult and rare. As Earth's largest terrestrial biome, boreal forests influence carbon dynamics and climate regulation at a planetary scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding how species-rich communities persist is a foundational question in ecology. In tropical forests, tree diversity is structured by edaphic factors, climate, and biotic interactions, with seasonality playing an essential role at landscape scales: wetter and less seasonal forests typically harbor higher tree diversity than more seasonal forests. We posited that the abiotic factors shaping tree diversity extend to hyperdiverse symbionts in leaves-fungal endophytes-that influence plant health, function, and resilience to stress.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIsolating microbes is vital to study microbiomes, but insights into microbial diversity and ecology can be constrained by recalcitrant or unculturable strains. Culture-free methods (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWood-devastating insects utilize their symbiotic microbes with lignocellulose-degrading abilities to extract energy from recalcitrant woods. It is well known that free-living lignocellulose-degrading fungi secrete various carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZymes) to degrade plant cell wall components, mainly cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. However, CAZymes from insect-symbiotic fungi have not been well documented except for a few examples.
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