| Popis: |
The study of bacterial-fungal interactions is essential to obtain a better understanding of terrestrial microbial ecology and may lie at the basis of novel applications in agriculture, food industry and human health. Nevertheless, the incentives, the genetic determinants and the mechanisms that underlie bacterial-fungal interactions are still poorly understood. Bacterial mycophagy is a trophic behaviour that takes place when bacteria obtain nutrients from living fungal hyphae, allowing the conversion of living fungal biomass into bacterial biomass (29). This trophic behavior was demonstrated for the first time for bacteria of the genus Collimonas, based on their ability to grow at the expenses of living fungal hyphae in a soil-like microcosm (28, 30). In this thesis I addressed the following research questions: (1) Which of the mechanisms putatively involved in Collimonas mycophagy are actually activated when Collimonas interact with a fungus (2) What is the fungal response to the presence of Collimonas bacteria? (3) What is the role played by plasmid pTer331, detected in the genome of the mycophagous bacterium C. fungivorans Ter331, in the ecology of this bacterium? Are the genes encoded on plasmid pTer331 involved in mycophagy? (4) Are the putative determinants of mycophagy uniformly distributed among Collimonas species? |
