What makes a lichen?
Examines the evolution and mechanisms of symbiosis across aquatic environments, which will further enable us to probe into the role of symbiosis and partner switching in enabling organisms like lichens to colonize and survive harsh conditions
Project Lead/s
Nick Talbot, The Sainsbury Laboratory
Project Summary
Marine and freshwater fungi are a fascinating yet often overlooked group, playing important roles as decomposers, commensals, pathogens, and mutualists, with possible involvement in sea to land (and vice versa) transitions throughout earth’s history.
Lichenized fungi are largely terrestrial, yet multiple lineages have convergently evolved into marine and freshwater habitats. Lichenization – the symbiosis between a filamentous fungal partner and a photosynthetic partner (typically algae, or cyanobacteria), has independently been gained and lost multiple times on the fungal tree of life. One in five ascomycetes are lichenized, and lichens can be found across every terrestrial ecosystem from lush tropical forests to deserts, from mountain tops to tidelines, attesting to the advantages that this symbiosis conveys. Despite the ubiquity of lichens, there is still an immense amount we don’t know about the basis of their symbiosis, and few genomes have been sequenced, particularly of both partners.
We propose to study three independent groups of closely related marine, freshwater and terrestrial lichens (and lichen-like associations) to examine the evolution and mechanisms of symbiosis across aquatic environments, which will further enable us to probe into the role of symbiosis and partner switching in enabling organisms like lichens to colonize and survive harsh conditions.