What are fungi?

Younes Rashad

Agaricus sp .

• Large and important genus of mushrooms containing both edible and poisonous species.

• Characterized by having a fleshy cap or Pileus

• From the underside of which grow a number of radiating plates or gills on which are produced the naked spores.

• A stem or stipe, which elevates the pileus above the object on which the mushroom grows.

Kingdom: Mycota

Subkingdom: Eumycotina

Phylum: Basidiomycota

Class: Basidiomycetes

Puccinia graminis

•Cause the stem, black or cereal rusts .

• has a complex life cycle featuring alternation of generation.

•Heteroecious which means that its various life cycle stages require alternate host species. .

• The complete life cycle of P. graminis requires barberry as well as a cereal species.

•In the spring and summer, stem rust infections on cereal plants produce dikaryotic urediniospores.

•Towards the end of the growing season, the rust converts to producing teliospores.

Kingdom: Mycota

Subkingdom: Eumycotina

Phylum: Basidiomycota

Class: Basidiomycetes

Urediniospores

Teliospores

• Before the winter, the nucleii fuse to form a diploid cell, which remains dormant until the next spring when it undergoes meiosis to produce four haploid cells known as basidiospores, borne on a structure called a basidium.

• Basidiospores cannot infect cerral plants, and infect young leaves of common barberry

• On barberry, the basidiospores penetrates the leaf epidermis directly, and the resulting infections produce specialized infection structures called pycnia (or spermagonia).

• When a receptive hypha from one pycnium has been fertilized by pycniospores (or spermatia) its haploid cells become dikaryotic. The fertilized hypha forms an aecium, on the underside of the barberry leaf, which produces chains of aeciospores surrounded by a bell-like enclosure of fungal cells.

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