Lichen and fungal ecology

Lichens are not single organisms but intimate partnerships between fungi and photosynthetic partners — usually algae or cyanobacteria — and understanding how these symbioses form, persist, and diversify sits at the heart of lichen and fungal ecology. Because lichens are exquisitely sensitive to shifts in air chemistry, researchers use them as living gauges of pollution, tracking how species composition across a landscape reflects the history of industrial emissions or urban growth. The secondary metabolites lichens produce — a chemically diverse arsenal with antimicrobial, UV-protective, and allelopathic properties — remain incompletely catalogued, and their ecological functions are only beginning to be untangled. Phylogenetic work is simultaneously reordering our picture of how lichen-forming fungi evolved and how many times the symbiotic lifestyle arose independently across the fungal tree of life.

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101,828

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765,050

Keywords

LichenSymbiosisBiomonitoringSecondary MetabolitesPhylogenetic AnalysisAir Pollution