Ryder Lauren S, Sprakel Joris, Talbot Nicholas J
The Sainsbury Laboratory, University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich NR4 7UH, UK.
Laboratory of Biochemistry, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, the Netherlands.
Curr Biol. 2025 Jun 9;35(11):R485-R490. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.01.036.
Our usual encounters with fungi are when we observe mushrooms in forests or moulds on food that we failed to eat on time. In both instances, however, we are only seeing a very limited view of fungal growth. Fungi are osmotrophs, which means that they consume the food that surrounds them by secreting enzymes to degrade polymers into simple sugars, fatty acids and amino acids. This type of growth has a number of consequences - it explains why fungi secrete toxins and antibiotics to protect their food sources from competitors and why they can grow so rapidly. It also explains why fungi have evolved the capacity to forcefully invade hard substrates, such as wood, animal skins and the cuticles of plants. By doing so, they can access new sources of food, often inaccessible to their competition, and this has enabled fungi to become highly successful pathogens of both animals and plants, causing diseases in organisms as diverse as insects, amphibians, humans, reptiles, and rice plants. It is becoming clear that, in addition to their prodigious secretion of enzymes to degrade complex substrates, fungi can exert very substantial physical forces. Such forces are probably essential for many aspects of the fungal lifestyle, including colonisation of their usual habitats like soil and leaf litter, which require penetration and invasion to enable their digestion by fungi. But for pathogenic fungi, the requirement for invasive growth is even more acute. In this Primer, we explore the mechanobiology of fungal invasive growth and the emerging view of the different mechanisms that fungal pathogens deploy to gain entry to host tissue. We focus mainly on plant pathogens, where recent experimental work has been most extensive, and highlight key research questions for the future.
我们通常遇到真菌的情况是在森林中观察蘑菇，或者看到食物上长出霉菌，而这些食物是我们没能及时吃掉的。然而，在这两种情况下，我们看到的都只是真菌生长的非常有限的一面。真菌是渗透营养型生物，这意味着它们通过分泌酶将聚合物降解为单糖、脂肪酸和氨基酸来消耗周围的食物。这种生长方式会产生一系列后果——这就解释了为什么真菌会分泌毒素和抗生素来保护其食物来源免受竞争者的侵害，以及它们为什么能如此迅速地生长。这也解释了为什么真菌进化出了强行侵入坚硬基质（如木材、动物皮肤和植物角质层）的能力。通过这样做，它们能够获取新的食物来源，而这些来源通常是其竞争者无法获得的，这使得真菌成为动植物非常成功的病原体，在昆虫、两栖动物、人类、爬行动物和水稻等各种生物中引发疾病。越来越明显的是，除了大量分泌酶来降解复杂底物外，真菌还能施加非常强大的物理力。这种力可能对真菌生活方式的许多方面都至关重要，包括在土壤和落叶层等它们通常的栖息地进行定殖，这需要穿透和侵入才能使真菌进行消化。但对于致病真菌来说，侵入性生长的需求更为迫切。在本入门文章中，我们探讨了真菌侵入性生长的力学生物学以及致病真菌用于进入宿主组织的不同机制的新观点。我们主要关注植物病原体，因为最近在这方面的实验工作最为广泛，并突出了未来的关键研究问题。
