Abstract
Many organisms benefit from being pre-adapted to niches shaped by human activity, and have successfully invaded man-made habitats. One such species is the dry rot fungus Serpula lacrymans, which has a wide distribution in buildings in temperate and boreal regions, where it decomposes coniferous construction wood. Comparative genomic analyses and growth experiments using this species and its wild relatives revealed that S. lacrymans evolved a very effective brown rot decay compared to its wild relatives, enabling an extremely rapid decay in buildings under suitable conditions. Adaptations in intracellular transport machineries promoting hyphal growth, and nutrient and water transport may explain why it is has become a successful invader of timber in houses. Further, we demonstrate that S. lacrymans has poor combative ability in our experimental setup, compared to other brown rot fungi. In sheltered indoor conditions, the dry rot fungus may have limited encounters with other wood decay fungi compared to its wild relatives. Overall, our analyses indicate that the dry rot fungus is an ecological specialist with poor combative ability against other fungi.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Sarah Watkinson for fronting the JGI genome, Ella Thoen for technical help, Anikó Várnai for discussions, and Skui Christmas Tree Plantation for the Abies lasiocarpa wood. S.V.B, J.H., H.K., L.T., and I.S. acknowledge the University of Oslo and Norwegian Research Council (project 221840) for funding. N.H. thanks the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and FORMAS (project 2010-1354) for funding. D.C.E., S.C.M., and L.B. thank the UK Natural Environment Research Council, (award NE/K011588/1) for support. Sequencing of SL200 and SHA17-1 was performed by the SNP&SEQ Technology Platform in Uppsala. The facility is part of the National Genomics Infrastructure (NGI) Sweden and Science for Life Laboratory. The SNP&SEQ Platform is also supported bu the Swedish Research Council and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. The work conducted by the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, was supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.
Author contributions
I.S., J.H., H.K., D.C.E., N.H., and L.B. conceived and designed the research. L.T, I.S., and J.H. analyzed physiological properties. I.S. and N.H. extracted DNA., K.L., A.A., K.B., and I.V.G. sequenced and analyzed the S. himantioides genome at JGI., S.V.B., M.B.D., J.H., C.P., I.S. and S.C.M. analyzed genomic data. S.V.B., J.H., D.C.E,, H.K. and I.S. wrote the paper and all other authors discussed and modified the paper.
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Balasundaram, S.V., Hess, J., Durling, M.B. et al. The fungus that came in from the cold: dry rot’s pre-adapted ability to invade buildings. ISME J 12, 791–801 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-017-0006-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-017-0006-8
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