Spore Spotting
Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how a fungus reproduces, let alone about what the process might look like. But here you can see a network of soil fungus, with a reproductive spore at the center of the image.
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Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how a fungus reproduces, let alone about what the process might look like. But here you can see a network of soil fungus, with a reproductive spore at the center of the image.
What am I looking at?
This is a depth-coded image of an arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus, a soil-dwelling fungus. The colors in this image represent the distance each part of the fungus is from the viewer. The parts shown in blue and purple are closer to the viewer, while the yellow and red parts are farther away from the viewer. The colored “tubes” in this image are hyphae (1) – the filaments that make up the “body” of a multicellular fungus. The sphere in the middle of the image with the colorful dots inside it (2) is a spore that the fungus can use to reproduce. Those colorful dots within the spore are its multiple nuclei.
Biology in the background
Fungi are key players in the health of many ecosystems all around the globe. They are responsible for the breakdown and recycling of a huge amount of organic matter, such as dead plants and animals, which is an essential function for the health of all ecosystems. This fungus is even more interesting because it lives in and near the roots of plants that grow in soil, so these fungal networks play a significant role in the capture and storage of carbon dioxide – a process known as carbon sequestration. Since the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a major contributor to global warming, the ability of fungi like these to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is beneficial to the global ecosystem.
The spores of this fungus are how it reproduces and spreads. Unlike many fungi, this one does not produce mushrooms to release its spores. The spores are released directly into the soil, where they mature and grow into adult fungi. Also, although most fungal spores only have a single nucleus, this fungus has multiple nuclei in each of its spores. There can even be thousands of nuclei contained within a single spore.
Hyphae like those in this image can be up to 5 micrometers thick, or roughly 15 times smaller than the width of a human hair. A spore is about 20 micrometers wide, or roughly four times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Technique
This image was created using fluorescence microscopy.
Vasileios Kokkoris, Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands