Money Nicholas P
Western Program and Department of Biology, Miami University, Oxford, OH, 45056, USA.
Fungal Biol. 2023 Jan-Feb;127(1-2):835-844. doi: 10.1016/j.funbio.2023.01.001. Epub 2023 Jan 6.
The coalescence of fluid droplets on the surface of ballistospores powers their launch into the air at a speed of up to one meter per second with an acceleration of thousands of g's. This mechanism has been studied for more than a century and its solution is an emblem of mycological progress. Because the spores move too fast for the launch to be watched with a light microscope, early advances were made by inferences about what must be happening when the spores disappeared rather than direct observations. These investigations were followed by ingenious experiments that led to a satisfying explanation of ballistospory by the 1990s. Ultra-high-speed video recordings of spore discharge verified this model in the 2000s and subsequent research has shown how the mechanism has been adapted to launch spores over different distances. The available evidence suggests that many of these adaptations have been achieved by changes in spore morphology. Understanding the cellular and genetic basis of these modifications is one of the principal challenges for understanding the evolution of the basidiomycetes.
掷孢子表面的液滴聚结，使其以高达每秒一米的速度、数千倍重力加速度弹射到空气中。这一机制已被研究了一个多世纪，其破解是真菌学进展的一个标志。由于孢子移动速度太快，无法用光学显微镜观察弹射过程，早期的进展是通过推断孢子消失时必然发生的情况得出的，而非直接观察。随后进行了巧妙的实验，到20世纪90年代，对掷孢现象给出了令人满意的解释。21世纪初，孢子弹射的超高速视频记录证实了这一模型，随后的研究揭示了该机制是如何适应在不同距离弹射孢子的。现有证据表明，其中许多适应性变化是通过孢子形态的改变实现的。了解这些变化的细胞和遗传基础是理解担子菌进化的主要挑战之一。
