21.

4 - Fungi
 Fungi and You

Believe it or not, fungi play an important role in

your life. The bread you eat, the salad you make,
and the medicine that you take when you are
sick may include various types of fungi or
products made from fungi.
 What Are Fungi?

Types: mushrooms, mold

, yeast, mildew, and truffles

Basic characteristics:
• Heterotrophic eukaryotes
• Many feed by absorbing nutrients from decaying matter
• Others live as parasites absorb nutrients from their hosts
 What Are Fungi?

• Cell walls made of chitin (polymer of modified sugars, also

found in arthropod exoskeletons)
• Evidence that fungi are more closely related to animals than plants

• Instead of photosynthesis, fungi produce enzymes that digest

food outside their bodies, then absorb the small molecules
released by the enzymes
 Structure and Function
yeasts – single-celled
 mushrooms - multi-celled
• hyphae - long, slender branching filaments
• mycelium - mass of branching hyphae
below the soil
• mushroom fruiting body – reproductive
structure that grows above soil
• clusters of mushrooms are often part of
the same mycelium -> same organism
 Reproduction

• Asexually – release spores that travel through air/water or

break off a hypha
• Sexually – transfer of nuclei and cytoplasm from one hypha to
another, then create spores
 Diversity of Fungi

• more than 100,000 species

of fungi
• major groups differ in their
reproductive structures
 The Ecology of Fungi

1. Decomposition champions help ecosystems by breaking

down dead organisms/recycling essential elements and
nutrients
2. Parasitic fungi cause serious diseases in plants and animals
3. Mutualistic associations with photosynthetic organisms in
which both partners benefit
Made by: Abdulrahman Abdullah
Maher

class 12-c