Lichen and fungal ecology

Lichens are not single organisms but stable partnerships between fungi and photosynthetic partners—usually algae or cyanobacteria—that together colonize surfaces as harsh as bare rock and Arctic tundra. Because they absorb compounds directly from the atmosphere without a protective cuticle, they accumulate pollutants in ways that make them exceptionally sensitive recorders of air quality, and ecologists routinely use lichen communities to map sulfur dioxide, heavy metals, and nitrogen deposition across landscapes. Beyond biomonitoring, lichens produce a chemically diverse array of secondary metabolites—depsides, depsidones, and usnic acid among them—whose ecological roles and pharmaceutical potential remain incompletely understood. Active research is now pressing into how phylogenomic tools are reshaping the classification of lichen-forming fungi, and how the hidden microbial communities within lichen thalli—bacteria, additional fungi, and yeasts—contribute to the symbiosis in ways that traditional two-partner models never captured.

Works

102,933

Total citations

773,205

Keywords

LichenSymbiosisBiomonitoringSecondary MetabolitesPhylogenetic AnalysisAir Pollution