当前位置: X-MOL 学术Fungal Ecol. › 论文详情
Our official English website, www.x-mol.net, welcomes your feedback! (Note: you will need to create a separate account there.)
Fungal nutrition allocation enhances mutualism with fungus-growing termite
Fungal Ecology ( IF 1.9 ) Pub Date : 2019-06-04 , DOI: 10.1016/j.funeco.2019.04.001
Chun-I Chiu , Jie-Hao Ou , Chi-Yu Chen , Hou-Feng Li

Fungal nodules and aged fungus gardens are products of termite fungiculture systems, and are the diets of termites. To understand the nutrition flow in fungiculture, we quantified the number and mass of fungal nodules produced along with fungus garden maturation and analysed the α-amino acid and fatty acid compositions of fungal nodules, fungus gardens, and termite tissues of a fungus-growing termite, Odontotermes formosanus. 1 g of fungus garden produced 5,148 fungal nodules (∼68.0 mg). Approximately 7.0% of α-amino acids were allocated to the fungal nodules and the rest (∼93.0%) remained in the fungus gardens. The compositions of α-amino acids or fatty acids in aged fungus gardens and fungal nodules were more similar to that of termite tissues than fresh fungus gardens, which supports the idea that termites nutritionally depend on the fungal products. Among the 18 α-amino acids, tryptophan was an essential amino acid and was the only one missing from fresh and aged fungus gardens, but found in fungal nodules at significantly higher concentrations. Hence, termites must consume fungal nodules to obtain tryptophan for survival. Furthermore, the fungus spores incorporated in nodules, were transferred when nodules were ingested by termites. We propose that allocating tryptophan in fungal nodules is crucial to enhance the mutualism between the fungus and termite.

更新日期:2019-06-04
down
wechat
bug