Segmented co-infection of tree bark by different fungus
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biochemistry, Biodiversity, Cell Biology, Ecology, Microbiology
- Keywords
- microbial cross-talk, co-infection, time of flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS), mutualism, antagonistic behaviour, microbial community, symbiosis, antibiotics, microbial communications
- Copyright
- © 2017 Ng
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Segmented co-infection of tree bark by different fungus. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3239v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3239v1
Abstract
Co-existence of microbes in a community is the de facto state of microbial lifestyle in almost all niches on Earth. Thus, microbes live with other microbial species in close proximity, and evolution has selected for specific methods of communication between microbes that facilitated chemical cross-talk for understanding the identities of different microbes, and their relative antagonistic behaviour towards each other. Observation of different patches of dark and white on a tree bark highlights possible segmented co-infection of the bark with at least two different species of fungi. Although without clear boundary of separation between patches, antagonistic behaviour between the two species could not be ruled out. Other forms of interactions such as mutualism and symbiosis between the different fungal species could be elucidated with time of flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS) profiling of the biomolecules and chemicals mediating the communication highway between the microbes, whose identities could be determined by 16S rRNA sequencing.
Author Comment
This is a preprint describing an observation by the author.