Collaborative Research: Fungal Life History Strategies & Evolution: Insights from Isotopic Measurements and Phylogenetic Analysis

真菌作为植物和动物的腐烂者、共生者和病原体发挥着重要的生态作用，影响着社会。它们的酶对生物燃料的生产至关重要。尽管它们很重要，但人们对有多少真菌获得食物知之甚少。菌根真菌从植物中获取糖，以帮助寄主植物吸收营养，腐养真菌从腐烂的有机物中获得能量和营养。真菌是否在营养策略之间切换是真菌进化生态学中的一个关键问题。最近，测量碳-12、碳-13和碳-14同位素已被证明可以可靠地评估营养策略，因此为研究真菌营养策略的演变提供了新的机会。本研究将使用来自澳大利亚，亚洲和美国的存档真菌进行真菌营养策略的广泛调查。马萨诸塞州哈佛森林研究中心的一项特定地点研究也将用于检查真菌是否可以改变营养策略。这些研究将极大地扩展对真菌功能、系统发育和生态学之间联系的认识。提议的研究将产生更广泛的科学影响，将功能（同位素）方法和遗传方法整合在一个新的合作中，这将激发更大的进化生物学家、生态学家和真菌学家的兴趣。这些方法可以很容易地扩展到欧洲和非洲，以包括生产蘑菇的真菌的全球分布。该项目还将把当前的科学研究纳入具体的教育活动中，旨在激励未来的科学家，包括高中（真菌探索）、大学（克拉克大学ACE暑期研究所、哈佛森林大学本科生研究经验、UNH本科生研究会议）和研究生。

Fungi play important ecological roles and affect society through their activities as decayers, mutualists, and pathogens of plants and animals. Their enzymes are critical to biofuel production. Despite their importance, there is little known about how many fungi obtain food. Mycorrhizal fungi obtain sugars from plants in exchange for helping their host plants take up nutrients, and saprotrophic fungi obtain their energy and nutrients from decomposition of dead organic matter. Whether fungi switch between nutritional strategies is a key question in the evolutionary ecology of fungi. Recently, measuring carbon-12, carbon-13, and carbon-14 isotopes has been shown to reliably assess nutritional strategy, and therefore provides new opportunities to examine the evolution of nutritional strategies in fungi. This study will use archived fungi from Australia, Asia, and the US to conduct a broad survey of fungal nutritional strategies. A site-specific study at the Harvard Forest research site in Massachusetts will also be used to examine whether fungi can switch nutritional strategies. These studies will greatly expand knowledge on the links among fungal function, phylogeny, and ecology. The broader scientific impacts of the proposed research will result from integrating functional (isotopic) methods and genetic methods in a novel collaboration that should stimulate interest within the larger community of evolutionary biologists, ecologists, and mycologists. These methods could be readily expanded to Europe and Africa to include the global distribution of mushroom-producing fungi. This project will also incorporate current scientific research into specific educational activities designed to inspire future scientists including high school (fungal forays), college (Clark University's ACE Summer Institute, Research Experience for Undergraduates at Harvard Forest, the UNH Undergraduate Research Conference), and graduate students.