Many and varied kingdom of mushrooms. According to various experts, the number of species of these organisms ranges from 100 thousand to one and a half million. And that's not all discovered by science! By the way, it is called mycology and is one of the branches of botany, because for a long time scientists considered mushrooms to be plants. But this turned out to be not entirely true. Mushrooms have properties and characteristics that are characteristic of both plants and animals, which can combine them with both. That is why botanists identified them as a separate kingdom in nature.
Classification
According to the most important classification, mushrooms are divided into higher and lower. The higher fungi include multicellular and some unicellular organisms (for example, yeast, which, according to microbiologists, are secondarily unicellular). But today we will not talk about them. lower classfungi (more precisely, there are several of them: according to various classifications - from three to six) includes all classes of fungi, except for ascomycetes, basidiomycetes and deuteromycetes. And it has many representatives, very different from each other in appearance and functions.
Representatives of lower mushrooms
What is their main characteristic feature, around which they can be united according to some features? They are characterized by a vegetative body - mycelium, which does not have partitions, a unicellular structure. Sometimes such fungi do not form hyphae at all, but instead a plasmodium arises: a cytoplasm with many nuclei. They have less perfect sexual reproduction (in contrast to the higher ones, which are able to reproduce asexually as well). According to some classifications, lower fungi include: chytridiomycetes, oomycetes, zygomycetes. Other divisions are possible.
Cursed Tribe
The lower mushrooms also include useful ones, but many of them are harmful. Fungi are the cause of many diseases in both humans and animals. They affect the skin, hair, eyes and respiratory organs. Some provoke food poisoning and even death. About 200 species of fungi affect books and other paper products. Some feed on cereals, causing great harm to agriculture and human he alth. The lower fungi include those that infect wooden houses and railway wooden sleepers, and those that cause metal corrosion. No wonder the French botanist Veyant called theserepresentatives of the "damned tribe". He even believed that the lower mushrooms serve to deliberately violate the existing harmony of the rest of nature.
White mold (or mukor)
This bright representative of lower mushrooms can often appear on bread, flour, rolls and vegetables. There we sometimes observe it in the form of a whitish fluffy coating, which blackens with time. The mycelium itself - the mycelium of mucor - has a composition of threads, whitish and colorless (hence the popular name of the lower fungus). The mycelium is a single overgrown cell with many nuclei located in the cytoplasm. The method of reproduction of mucor is spore. Some of the filaments of the mycelium expand at the tips, forming black heads (while remaining only one cell). Spores form on them, ripening and crumbling. Then they are blown away by the wind. Once in a favorable environment, white mold spores form a new mycelium. Interestingly, mukor harms only humans, causing food spoilage. And in nature, it plays a rather positive role: it helps to decompose the remains of dead organisms.
Other "lower" pests
Some other harmful organisms also belong to the lower fungi. Phytophthora affects potatoes and tomatoes, causing blackening of tops and tubers. Synchitrium excites cancer of potato tubers. Olpidium cabbage, popularly called the "black leg", causes blackening of the roots and death of the plant. And a pathogenic fungus imported from America, Plasmopara Viticol, is damaging the vineyards of Europe.
