Symbiotic status alters fungal eco-evolutionary offspring trajectories

2023 · doi:10.32942/x2cs33
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This study analyzed a comprehensive database of over 26,000 fungal species to investigate how symbiotic status influences offspring morphology and evolutionary trajectories. The researchers found that shifts in symbiotic relationships correlated with significant variations in spore size, with plant-associated fungi exhibiting limited dispersal potential compared to free-living saprotrophs. While symbiotic status explained more variation in offspring size than environmental gradients for plant-associated fungi, the strength of this effect varied widely across different fungal phyla. This paper does not explicitly discuss endometriosis or adenomyosis; it was included in the corpus via a keyword match in the upstream search index.

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Abstract

Across free-living organisms, the ecology and evolution of offspring morphology is shaped by interactions with biotic and abiotic environments during dispersal and early establishment in new habitats. However, the ecology and evolution of offspring morphology for symbiotic species has been largely ignored despite host-symbiont interactions being ubiquitous in all ecosystems and across all branches of the tree of life. The kingdom Fungi provides an excellent opportunity to address this fundamental knowledge gap since symbiosis has been a major driver in trait evolution of this group. We assembled a database of fungal offspring morphology covering over 26,000 species of free-living to symbiotic fungi, including symbiotic relationships with plants, insects and humans and found more than eight orders of variation in offspring size. Evolutionary shifts in symbiotic status correlated with shifts in spore size, but the strength of this effect varied widely among phyla. Among plant associated fungi, symbiotic status explained more variation than environmental gradients in the current distribution of offspring sizes at a global scale; while being plant-associated limited the dispersal potential of fungal spores: in free-living saprotrophic fungi shifts to smaller spore size correlated with larger species’ extent of occurrence while in plant associated fungi this relationship does not hold. Our work advances life-history theory by highlighting how the interaction between symbiosis and offspring morphology shapes the reproductive and dispersal strategies among living forms
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Abstract

Across free-living organisms, the ecology and evolution of offspring morphology is shaped by interactions with biotic and abiotic environments during dispersal and early establishment in new habitats. However, the ecology and evolution of offspring morphology for symbiotic species has been largely ignored despite host-symbiont interactions being ubiquitous in all ecosystems and across all branches of the tree of life. The kingdom Fungi provides an excellent opportunity to address this fundamental knowledge gap since symbiosis has been a major driver in trait evolution of this group. We assembled a database of fungal offspring morphology covering over 26,000 species of free-living to symbiotic fungi, including symbiotic relationships with plants, insects and humans and found more than eight orders of variation in offspring size. Evolutionary shifts in symbiotic status correlated with shifts in spore size, but the strength of this effect varied widely among phyla. Among plant associated fungi, symbiotic status explained more variation than environmental gradients in the current distribution of offspring sizes at a global scale; while being plant-associated limited the dispersal potential of fungal spores: in free-living saprotrophic fungi shifts to smaller spore size correlated with larger species’ extent of occurrence while in plant associated fungi this relationship does not hold. Our work advances life-history theory by highlighting how the interaction between symbiosis and offspring morphology shapes the reproductive and dispersal strategies among living forms DOI https://doi.org/10.32942/X2CS33 Subjects Life Sciences

Keywords

offspring size, life-history, Symbiosis, fungal spores, functional ecology Dates Published: 2023-02-23 03:54 Last Updated: 2023-02-23 08:54 License CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Additional Metadata Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: https://github.com/aguilart/SporeSizeFungalKingdom Metrics Views: 975 Downloads: 554

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License: CC-BY-4.0