biocanvas:

A fungal infection (bright green) of an Arabidopsis (a plant related to cabbage and mustard) root.

Image by Kirk Czymmek, University of Delaware.

scientificillustration:

mycology:

n136_w1150 by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.

The Morel (Morchella esculenta)

scipsy:

Neurospora crassa (via)

A Pleasing Fungus Beetle (Gibbifer californicus); Gila NF, New Mexico.

Poop ecosystem.

A garden of earthly delights in Brasil.

(Source: unnaturalist, via smurfberries)

Science 18 February 2011: Visualization Challenge 2010

1st Place: Introduction to Fungi

Kandis Elliot ▪ Mo Fayyaz University of Wisconsin, Madison

For senior artist Kandis Elliot, postermaking is one of the best tasks of the job. Her series of educational posters started 4 years ago, when greenhouse and garden director Mo Fayyaz of the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison, asked for a fruit poster. Introduction to Fungi is just the latest—and one of the hardest, because the botany department lacks a mycologist. And Elliot didn’t want to settle for a simple mushroom poster. “There’s a gazillion of those things,” Elliot says. “We wanted something that shows fungi as mushrooms but something more than mushrooms. Your beer, your wine, and your bread. The stuff on the back of your fridge.”

The beer and wine are easy enough to spot in the center of this poster. Other specimens include gourmet delicacies, such as truffles and the mold on bleu cheese, and the less savory stinkhorns, whose stench attracts carrion beetles to disperse their spores. It also features some unfriendly fungi, such as the culprit behind white-nose syndrome, a mysterious white fungus that grows on hibernating bats and seems to kill them by leading to starvation.

“The fungi poster was a clear winner. That was just amazing,” says panel of judges member Alisa Zapp Machalek. Besides the imagery, the fact that it was about fungi had an appeal of its own. “There’s sort of an innate intrigue factor. If it was different kinds of apples, even though I love apples, I don’t know that it would hold our attention as much.” “It’s very appealing to the layperson,” says panel of judges member Corinne Sandone. “There’s nothing that hard. It’s very accessible.”

That’s valuable praise for Elliot, who says squeezing all the information in was one of the hardest parts. “There’s like 25 pounds of information on a 5-pound poster, and you want to put it in some kind of logical order,” she says. “There is order in there, but you kind of have to search for it.”

maxistentialist:

Penicillium, the genus of fungus that makes the white rind on brie cheese and the blue veins in blue cheese, is named after the latin word for “paintbrush” because of its shape.

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

Now, researchers report in the journal Nature that genes in certain plants fend off infections with the help of the clock as well.

Twenty-two genes in the plant Arabidopsis, all connected to the plant’s ability to resist infection, were expressed only from the evening onward, peaking at dawn.

The timing corresponds with the formation of spores in a funguslike pathogen that attacks the plant and results in a condition known as downy mildew disease. The disease weakens the plant and forms an unsavory coating of fuzzy mildew.

“From what we know, the pathogen forms spores at night and disseminates them at dawn, so that’s when the infection threat is highest,” said Xinnian Dong, a biologist at Duke University and one of the study’s authors.

During the day, when the pathogen is not likely to attack, the genes were not expressed.

This is the first time researchers have been able to make a functional connection between the circadian clock and pathogen resistance, Dr. Dong said.

She believes that if researchers can sort out the intricacies of the relationship between pathogens and hosts, and their circadian rhythms, there may be practical applications.

Pesticide treatments could be timed to have maximum impact, for instance. Or it may even be possible to determine ideal times for administering medications in humans, she said.

(Source: smurfberries)

(Source: smurfberries)

r0llerdisc0:

oh yeahhh!