Fungi from Extreme Environments
A special issue of Life (ISSN 2075-1729). This special issue belongs to the section "Microbiology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2018) | Viewed by 67595
Special Issue Editor
Interests: fungi from extreme environments
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Until the recent past, extreme environments have been typically considered a prerogative for prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea). In addition, it is now becoming evident that eukaryotes are also settlers in extremes and fungi, in particular, are providing clear evidence of a resistance that is even higher than prokaryotes. As a few examples, their ability to grow under salt-saturated conditions, or in sites polluted with ionizing radiation, as in the damaged reactor in Chernobyl, or beyond what was thought the limit of tolerability for water stress, outstretched considerably our concept of “limits for life”.
Information is rapidly growing on this issue due to the great deal of efforts recently made with respect to extreme fungi, with important implications in different fields. i) Their astonishing resistance is of astrobiological relevance to assess the habitability of extra-terrestrial environments and, hence, the possibility of life beyond Earth. ii) Their wide and versatile metabolic competences, as the production of extremozymes and degradation of pollutants, are of high biotechnological potential and promising tools for contributing towards a more sustainable world. iii) The description of new fungal taxa from border environments is being extremely fruitful and is contributing to the widening of our knowledge on the amplitude of mycodiversity. iv) Phylogenetic studies are helping to acquire tools in how life evolves and adapts under extreme conditions, with implications in understanding the early evolution of life on Earth.
This Special Issue aims to focus on all these aspects in a collection of both reviews and original articles encompassing ecology, biodiversity, phylogeny, evolution, biotechnology and astrobiology.
Dr. Laura Selbmann
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- phylogeny
- resistance
- survival
- adaptation
- astrobiology
- extremozymes
- extremo-tolerance
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