New research shows fungi diversified nearly a billion years ago, shaping soils and ecosystems long before plants colonized ...

Directed evolution is a laboratory technique that mimics natural selection and allows scientists to evolve genes and the ...

Researchers have discovered that plants benefit from a greater variety of interactions with pollinators and herbivores. Plants that are pollinated by insects and have to defend themselves against ...

Fungi arose long before plants, shaping Earth with early soils and nutrient cycles. Their hidden legacy shows they may have ...

New research reveals fungi, not plants, were Earth's first land colonizers, emerging hundreds of millions of years earlier.

Fungi may have shaped Earth’s landscapes long before plants appeared. By combining rare gene transfers with fossil evidence, researchers have traced fungal origins back nearly a billion years earlier ...

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered that a protein responsible for the synthesis of a key plant material evolved much earlier than ...

New research published in Nature Ecology & Evolution sheds light on the timelines and pathways of evolution of fungi, finding ...