Fungus and Plants

HugsiePie

Hey, just wondering does anyone know any harmful effects plants have on fungus....I realise fungus can be very harmful to some plants, but is there anyway that plants can cause harm to fungus other than "self defence" or fighting back against the initial fungal infection?

kaki

HugsiePie wrote: »

Hey, just wondering does anyone know any harmful effects plants have on fungus....I realise fungus can be very harmful to some plants, but is there anyway that plants can cause harm to fungus other than "self defence" or fighting back against the initial fungal infection?

Just starting Botany myself so I am not 100% sure. But my guess is that broadly speaking plants wouldn't cause harm to a fungus directly as plants can produce their own food through photosynthesis.

The opposite is not true for fungi as they are heterotrophic, so they must get their nutrition from living hosts (biotrophs) or from already-dead hosts (saprotrophs) or attack/kill a living host and absorb the released nutrients (necrotrophs).

As you said, plants have defense mechanisms against fungal disease, including physical barriers (e.g. cuticle, bark) and chemical barriers (e.g. toxins and oxidisers) - but these are preventative or in response to a fungal attack. Additionally, many fungi have ways of circumventing these defences - I remember coming across a section in one of my textbooks comparing it to a biological arms race!

phragmities

Hi,
Plants have many potential defence mechanisms against fungal attack. There are many adaptations in the plant kingdom which allow plants to supress infection or prevent it entirely.
Members of the Lamiaceae for example can be shown to have strong fungal suppression and preservation properties on Botrytis (a common food spoilage fungus and a problem in seedling and cutting etc in Horticulture)
Depending on how interested you are on this there is a lot of work in the rapidly remerging area of Herbal Sciences which can be googled.
This is particularly relevant to modern medicine and practices where antibiotics are becoming increasingly ineffective against bacterial infections in humans and animals. Older research in the herbal sciences areas are being revisited and redeveloped using modern scientific techniques and applied with great success at a scientific level in the laboratory and also in real world situations in areas of plant animal and human health.

Hope this helps?

kaki

Herbal Science 4LYF.

Also came across this recently, kind of related to the original question and quite a good read:

Plants talk to each other using an internet of fungus: link (BBC News) or link (full research paper)

Disclaimer: BBC article humanises plants as "crafty" etc. Just in case that makes anyone else cringe. Maybe it's just me.

Capt'n Midnight

kaki wrote: »

Disclaimer: BBC article humanises plants as "crafty" etc. Just in case that makes anyone else cringe. Maybe it's just me.

No it's not just you. The plants hate it too.