Poinar George O, Vega Fernando E
Department of Integrative Biology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, 97331, USA.
Sustainable Perennial Crops Laboratory, United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Beltsville, MD, 20705, USA.
Fungal Biol. 2018 Dec;122(12):1159-1162. doi: 10.1016/j.funbio.2018.08.002. Epub 2018 Aug 22.
An ambrosia fungus is described from filamentous sporodochia adjacent to a wood-boring ambrosia beetle (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Platypodinae) in mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber. Yeast-like propagules and hyphal fragments of Paleoambrosia entomophila gen. nov. et sp. nov. occur in glandular sac mycangia located inside the femur of the beetle. This is the first record of a fossil ambrosia fungus, showing that symbiotic associations between wood-boring insects and ectosymbiotic fungi date back some 100 million years ago. The present finding moves the origin of fungus-growing by insects from the Oligocene to the mid-Cretaceous and suggests a Gondwanan origin.
在白垩纪中期的缅甸琥珀中，从与一种蛀木食菌甲虫（鞘翅目：象甲科：长小蠹亚科）相邻的丝状分生孢子座中描述了一种蜜环菌。新属新种古嗜虫蜜环菌（Paleoambrosia entomophila）的酵母样繁殖体和菌丝片段存在于甲虫股骨内的腺囊菌腔中。这是化石蜜环菌的首次记录，表明蛀木昆虫与外共生真菌之间的共生关系可追溯到约1亿年前。目前的发现将昆虫培育真菌的起源从渐新世推至白垩纪中期，并暗示其起源于冈瓦纳。
