Mycology 2019

Mushrooms

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The mushroom is a spore-bearing, fleshy fruiting body of a fungus, which grows above ground on soil or on organic food source. The most important microscopic feature for identification of mushrooms is the spores. Their spores, called basidiospores, are produced on the gills and fall in a fine rain of powder from under the caps as a result. Mushrooms are the fruit bodies of members of the order agaricales, whose type genus is agaricus and type species is the field mushroom, agaricus campestris. However, in modern molecularly defined classifications, not all members of the order agaricales produce mushroom fruit bodies, and many other gilled fungi, collectively called mushrooms, occur in other orders of the class agaricomycetes. It is formed within the mycelium, the mass of threadlike hyphae that make up the fungus. Many species of mushrooms seemingly appear overnight, growing or expanding rapidly. In reality all species of mushrooms take several days to form primordial mushroom fruit bodies, though they do expand rapidly by the absorption of fluids. An atypical mushroom is the lobster mushroom, which is a deformed, by the mycoparasitic ascomycete hypomyces lactifluorum. Some are having pores underneath, others have spines.