ArticleNature communications2020
A mechanistic explanation of the transition to simple multicellularity in fungi.
Article in Nature communications, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Signatures of gene transfer in the parallel evolution of osmotrophic specialization in eukaryotes.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Regulation of extracellular vesicles for protein secretion inMicrobial cell (Graz, Austria) · 2026Article
- Mechanisms of Differential Resource Uptake and Translocation in Agaricus bisporus.Environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Not Extremely Plastic: Testing the Limits of Morphological Plasticity in Fungal Mycelia in Response to Soil Grazers.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Compartment-specific dynamics of soil microbiota along aFrontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- The assembly processes and network characteristics of bacterial, fungal and archaeal communities in the middle Yangtze River and river-connected lakes.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- Syncytial Assembly Lines: Consequences of Multinucleate Cellular Compartments for Fungal Protein Synthesis.Results and problems in cell differentiation · 2024Review
- Sequencing the Genomes of the First Terrestrial Fungal Lineages: What Have We Learned?Microorganisms · 2023Review
- Network traits predict ecological strategies in fungi.ISME communications · 2022Article
- Article
- Mosaic fungal individuals have the potential to evolve within a single generation.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Syncytia in Fungi.Cells · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Development of multicellularity was one of the major transitions in evolution and occurred independently multiple times in algae, plants, animals, and fungi. However recent comparative genome analyses suggest that fungi followed a different route to other eukaryotic lineages. To understand the driving forces behind the transition from unicellular fungi to hyphal forms of growth, we develop a comparative model of osmotrophic resource acquisition. This predicts that whenever the local resource is immobile, hard-to-digest, and nutrient poor, hyphal osmotrophs outcompete motile or autolytic unicellular osmotrophs. This hyphal advantage arises because transporting nutrients via a contiguous cytoplasm enables continued exploitation of remaining resources after local depletion of essential nutrients, and more efficient use of costly exoenzymes. The model provides a mechanistic explanation for the origins of multicellular hyphal organisms, and explains why fungi, rather than unicellular bacteria, evolved to dominate decay of recalcitrant, nutrient poor substrates such as leaf litter or wood.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.