Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA; Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA 02354, USA.
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
Curr Biol. 2019 Mar 18;29(6):R191-R195. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.02.009.
Fungi play a dominant role in terrestrial environments where they thrive in symbiotic associations with plants and animals and are integral to nutrient cycling in diverse ecosystems. Everywhere that moisture and a carbon source coexist in the terrestrial biosphere, fungi are expected to occur. We know that fungi can be devastating to agricultural crops, both in the field and during their storage, and cause mortality in immunocompromised patients in numbers that rival the deaths from malaria. Yet fungi can also be harnessed as sources of food, chemicals and biofuels when humans exploit fungal metabolism. Despite their central role in the health and disease of the terrestrial biosphere, much less is known about the function and potential of marine fungi. Are fungi ubiquitous in marine environments as they are on land? Do they play the same or similar roles in these ecosystems? Here we describe the state of knowledge about the abundance and functions of fungi in the marine environment with a goal to stimulate new inquiry in this very open area.
真菌在陆地环境中扮演着主导角色，它们与植物和动物共生，并在各种生态系统的养分循环中起着不可或缺的作用。在陆地生物圈中，只要有水分和碳源共存的地方，就有望出现真菌。我们知道，真菌既能在田间，也能在储存过程中对农作物造成严重破坏，并使免疫功能低下的患者死亡，其数量可与疟疾导致的死亡人数相媲美。然而，当人类利用真菌的新陈代谢时，真菌也可以作为食物、化学品和生物燃料的来源。尽管真菌在陆地生物圈的健康和疾病中起着核心作用，但人们对海洋真菌的功能和潜力知之甚少。在海洋环境中，真菌是否像在陆地上那样无处不在？它们在这些生态系统中扮演着相同或相似的角色吗？在这里，我们描述了海洋环境中真菌丰度和功能的知识现状，旨在激发这一非常开放领域的新研究。
