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A fungal plant pathogen discovered in the Devonian Rhynie Chert

; 
Goral, Tomasz
; 
Spencer, Alan RT
; ; 
Catherine Aime, M
; 
Gaya, Ester
; 
Hawksworth, David L
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2023-12-01
Submitted Date
2023-02-06
Subject Terms
confocal microscopy
environmental sciences
palaeoecology
palaeontology
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Earth sciences
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Abstract
Abstract: Fungi are integral to well-functioning ecosystems, and their broader impact on Earth systems is widely acknowledged. Fossil evidence from the Rhynie Chert (Scotland, UK) shows that Fungi were already diverse in terrestrial ecosystems over 407-million-years-ago, yet evidence for the occurrence of Dikarya (the subkingdom of Fungi that includes the phyla Ascomycota and Basidiomycota) in this site is scant. Here we describe a particularly well-preserved asexual fungus from the Rhynie Chert which we examined using brightfield and confocal microscopy. We document Potteromyces asteroxylicola gen. et sp. nov. that we attribute to Ascomycota incertae sedis (Dikarya). The fungus forms a stroma-like structure with conidiophores arising in tufts outside the cuticle on aerial axes and leaf-like appendages of the lycopsid plant Asteroxylon mackiei. It causes a reaction in the plant that gives rise to dome-shaped surface projections. This suite of features in the fungus together with the plant reaction tissues provides evidence of it being a plant pathogenic fungus. The fungus evidently belongs to an extinct lineage of ascomycetes that could serve as a minimum node age calibration point for the Ascomycota as a whole, or even the Dikarya crown group, along with some other Ascomycota previously documented in the Rhynie Chert.
Citation
Strullu-Derrien, C., Goral, T., Spencer, A.R.T. et al. A fungal plant pathogen discovered in the Devonian Rhynie Chert. Nat Commun 14, 7932 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-43276-1
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Springer Science and Business Media LLC
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Nature Communications
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http://hdl.handle.net/10141/623092
DOI
10.1038/s41467-023-43276-1
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright. The linked document is the published version of the article. holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/.
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2041-1723
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2041-1723
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