TY - JOUR
T1 - Fungal social barriers
T2 - to fuse, or not to fuse, that is the question
AU - Gonçalves, A. Pedro
AU - Glass, N. Louise
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by a National Science Foundation Grant (MCB1412411), a Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under U.S. Department of Energy (Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231) and USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (Hatch project CA-B-MIC-0129-H) to NLG. We would like to thank all the members of the Glass Lab at the University of California, Berkeley who have made important contributions to the field of fungal allorecognition over the last 25 years.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2020/1/1
Y1 - 2020/1/1
N2 - Cell fusion takes place in all domains of life and contributes greatly to the formation of complex multicellular structures. In particular, many fungi, such as the filamentous Neurospora crassa, rely on conspecific somatic cell fusion to drive the unicellular-to-multicellular transition and formation of the interconnected mycelial syncytium. This can, however, lead to the transmission of infectious elements and deleterious genotypes that have a negative impact on the organismal fitness. Accumulating evidence obtained from natural populations suggests that N. crassa has evolved various self/non-self or allorecognition systems to avoid fusion between genetically non-identical spores or hyphae at all costs. Here we present an overview of the recent advances made in the field of fungal allorecognition, describe its genetic basis, and comment on its evolutionary meaning. These data pinpoint the multilayered complexity of the cooperative social behaviors undertaken by a model eukaryotic microbe.
AB - Cell fusion takes place in all domains of life and contributes greatly to the formation of complex multicellular structures. In particular, many fungi, such as the filamentous Neurospora crassa, rely on conspecific somatic cell fusion to drive the unicellular-to-multicellular transition and formation of the interconnected mycelial syncytium. This can, however, lead to the transmission of infectious elements and deleterious genotypes that have a negative impact on the organismal fitness. Accumulating evidence obtained from natural populations suggests that N. crassa has evolved various self/non-self or allorecognition systems to avoid fusion between genetically non-identical spores or hyphae at all costs. Here we present an overview of the recent advances made in the field of fungal allorecognition, describe its genetic basis, and comment on its evolutionary meaning. These data pinpoint the multilayered complexity of the cooperative social behaviors undertaken by a model eukaryotic microbe.
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U2 - 10.1080/19420889.2020.1740554
DO - 10.1080/19420889.2020.1740554
M3 - Comment/debate
AN - SCOPUS:85081905426
SN - 1942-0889
VL - 13
SP - 39
EP - 42
JO - Communicative and Integrative Biology
JF - Communicative and Integrative Biology
IS - 1
ER -