BIOL 1002 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Fairy Ring, Basidium, Dutch Elm Disease
Document Summary
The kingdom fungi consists of organisms that are eukaryotic and mainly multicellular. They are all heterotrophic decomposers that obtain their food by absorption. Most members of the kingdom fungi have several structural elements in common: Mycelium -is the feeding network of a fungus. (see fig 22-1 a) This network may be very large but is usually underground or within the surface of a decaying organism. The mycelium is composed of a woven mesh of hyphae. Hyphae - the threadlike filaments of a fungus. (see fig 22-1 b) These filaments are the building structure of the mycelium. They consist of a tubular cell wall containing chitin surrounding a plasma membrane and cytoplasm. Chitin - a structural polysaccharide of modified sugars. In some fungi (coenocytic fungi) there are no separate cells and many nuclei are in a common cytoplasm. In other types of fungi (dikaryotic) the nuclei are partitioned into twos by septa.
