"Wood fungi" are eukaryotic and
carbon-heterotrophic (free from chlorophyll) organisms with chitin in the cell
wall, reproduce asexually and/or sexually by non-flagellate spores,
filamentous, immovable and mostly land inhabiting. Damage to wood in water by
fungi is described by Jones and Irvine , Jones and Kim and Singh .
Soft-rot fungi belonging to the Ascomycetes and Deuteromycetes destroy
wood with high moisture content in water or soil (e.g., Findlay and Savory
1954; Liese 1955). Fungi associated with leaf litter in a woodland stream were
treated by Suberkropp .
A fungal cell,
the hypha, is defined as one individual cell of mostly tubular shape that
consists of a cell wall, contains a protoplasm with a nucleus and other
organelles, and is in the "higher fungi" separated from its one or
two neighbors by a transverse wall, the septum (Fig. 2.1). In analogy to the
"higher plants", where nearly every living cell is connected to its
neighbors by cytoplasmic channels, the plasmodesmata, which pass through the
intervening cell walls, also the protoplasms of neighbored hyphae are connected
with each other through the pore or dolipore system . This basic
hypha is termed "vegetative hypha" in this book.
This definition contrasts
to others where one hypha, also termed generative hypha, is a more or less long
filament consisting of several hyphal "compartments", a definition
that is hazy because the transition to the next higher unit, the mycelium, is
flowing. The mycelium is thus the filamentous lining up of hyphae, consisting
in young mycelia of only a few vegetative hyphae and in older ones of several
and branched hyphae. Shows septate hyphae as they occur in the
wood-inhabiting Deuteromycetes, Ascomycetes, and Basidiomycetes.
The diameter of hyphae reaches from 0.1-0.4 p.m for the microhyphae of Phellinus pini (Liese and Schmid 1966) to 60 pm for the vessel hyphae in the mycelia/ strand (cord) of the True dry rot fungus, Serpula lacrymans, with an vegetative (S. lacy mans: 311m: Seehann average for hyphae of about 2-7 pm th reaches from about and v. Riebesell 1988). Their leng 5 pm for round/oval irometers. The size of many bacteria is between cells (spores) up to several mc 0.4 and 5pm.
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