A Field of Fungus
These golden strands look as if they could be the “amber waves of grain” extolled in the song “America the Beautiful.” But they’re actually spore-producing filaments, growing from a tangle of fibers called hyphae, of a mushroom called scarlet cup fungus. This fungus is known for its bright red, cup-shaped fruiting bodies, which led to their often being used for table decorations in medieval England and Russia.
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These golden strands look as if they could be the “amber waves of grain” extolled in the song “America the Beautiful.” But they’re actually spore-producing filaments, growing from a tangle of fibers called hyphae, of a mushroom called scarlet cup fungus. This fungus is known for its bright red, cup-shaped fruiting bodies, which led to their often being used for table decorations in medieval England and Russia.
What am I looking at?
This is an image of the hyphae and spores of a scarlet cup fungus (Sarcoscypha coccinea). Its fruiting body is shaped like a bowl, with the spore-producing hymenium on the top, or convex side. The tube-like structures at the bottom of the image are the fungus’s hyphae (1), which make up the mycelium that is the main “body” of the fungus. The light blue ovals are the spores that the fungus uses for reproduction (2). The vertical tubes in the middle of the image (3) are called asci (from the Greek word askos, meaning “bag” or “sac”) and are the part of the fungus that contains the spores before they are released into the environment.
Click on the right arrow to see some additional views of this fungus.
Biology in the background
This is a common fungus that grows on rotting vegetation like leaves and wood on the forest floor across most of the Northern Hemisphere and some parts of the Southern Hemisphere. While the fungus’s fruiting bodies (aka mushrooms) are edible, they are relatively scarce, small, and tough – so they are not a sought-after species for culinary purposes. However, their bright red color and distinctive cup shape, and the fact that they are not poisonous, did make these mushrooms a prized table decoration in higher-class households of the past.
The species’s spores (known as ascospores) come in eights. They are the product of two haploid nuclei (that is, nuclei that each contain a single set of chromosomes) fusing in the ascus to form a diploid nucleus (that is, with two sets of chromosomes). That nucleus then undergoes meiosis to produce four haploid nuclei, which divide by mitosis to create eight nuclei.
The hyphae of this fungus can grow up to about 3 micrometers thick, or roughly 25 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The asci can grow up to 375 micrometers long, or roughly five times the width of a human hair, and up to 16 micrometers wide, or roughly five times smaller than the width of a human hair. The spores can be 40 micrometers long, or roughly half the width of a human hair, and 12 micrometers wide, or roughly six times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Technique
These images were created using confocal microscopy.
TagsIgor Siwanowicz, HHMI's Janelia Research Campus