Lessons from culturing lichen soredia
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Lessons from culturing lichen soredia Ivana Černajová 1
&
Pavel Škaloud 1
Received: 20 July 2020 / Accepted: 13 September 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Vegetative propagules play various important roles in lichen biology. We cultured soredia of Cladonia lichens in vitro and obtained three noteworthy results. Firstly, soredia are a beneficial source for the isolation of lichen symbionts. The mycobiont was obtained from 66% and the photobiont from 67% of the cultured soredia that were not contaminated. Secondly, the development of soredia followed a previously recognized pattern, arachnoid stage – soredium field – primordium, but a thalline structure was not achieved. We suggest that thallus formation in vitro is a question of favourable environmental factors, not partners compatibility. Finally, we discovered that fungi, other than the mycobiont, as well as airborne contaminants are dispersed together with lichen soredia. This is the first-ever report of such a phenomenon. The possible ecological consequences are discussed. Cystobasidiomycete yeasts were found among these fungi. We isolated representatives of three different lineages from a single thallus suggesting a low specificity for this association.
1 Introduction Vegetative dispersal propagules are an exclusive expression of the lichen symbiotic phenotype (Ahmadjian 1993b). Soredia are small (20–50 µm) spherical clumps of a few algal cells and short hyphae, and among the most common means of reproduction in many lichens (Büdel and Scheidegger 2008). Their role in lichen biology is quite well-understood. Soredia provide a lichen the clear advantage of co-dispersal of both symbiotic partners, eliminating the need for recruitment of compatible algae, which are considered to be rare in the environment (Vančurová et al. 2020). As a result, however, sorediate lichen-forming Cladonia species have been shown to be more specific towards their photobionts, i. e. their potential range of compatible partners is lower (Steinová et al. 2019), which may limit their ecological niches and distribution ranges (Rolshausen et al. 2018; Vančurová et al. 2018). In addition to dispersal, soredia also serve as photobiont source for other lichens (Ahmadjian 1993a). This fact plays an important role in establishment of whole lichen communities. According to the core-fringe species hypothesis (Rikkinen et al. 2002), sexual lichen species (fringe) depend on the dispersal of suitable photobionts by asexual species (core). This
* Ivana Černajová [email protected] 1
Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Benátská 2, 12801 Prague, Czech Republic
hypothesis has been supported by recent studies (Belinchón et al. 2015; Cardós et al. 2019). Soredia are dispersed continuously in large amounts, often landing near the parent lichen thallus (Armstrong 1987). However, they are also carried by the wind up to distances of tens of meters (Armstrong 1987; Werth et al. 2006), and exceptionally hundreds or thousands of kilometers (Harmata and Olech 1991). Sored
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