Skip to main content
PMC home page
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences logoLink to Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
. 2004 Sep 7;271(1550):1777–1782. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2004.2759

Convergent coevolution in the domestication of coral mushrooms by fungus-growing ants.

A B Munkacsi 1, J J Pan 1, P Villesen 1, U G Mueller 1, M Blackwell 1, D J McLaughlin 1
PMCID: PMC1691797  PMID: 15315892

Abstract

Comparisons of phylogenetic patterns between coevolving symbionts can reveal rich details about the evolutionary history of symbioses. The ancient symbiosis between fungus-growing ants, their fungal cultivars, antibiotic-producing bacteria and cultivar-infecting parasites is dominated by a pattern of parallel coevolution, where the symbionts of each functional group are members of monophyletic groups. However, there is one outstanding exception in the fungus-growing ant system, the unidentified cultivar grown only by ants in the Apterostigma pilosum group. We classify this cultivar in the coral-mushroom family Pterulaceae using phylogenetic reconstructions based on broad taxon sampling, including the first mushroom collected from the garden of an ant species in the A. pilosum group. The domestication of the pterulaceous cultivar is independent from the domestication of the gilled mushrooms cultivated by all other fungus-growing ants. Yet it has the same overall assemblage of coevolved ant-cultivar-parasite-bacterium interactions as the other ant-grown fungal cultivars. This indicates a pattern of convergent coevolution in the fungus-growing ant system, where symbionts with both similar and very different evolutionary histories converge to functionally identical interactions.

Full Text

The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (266.2 KB).

Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

  1. Chapela I. H., Rehner S. A., Schultz T. R., Mueller U. G. Evolutionary history of the symbiosis between fungus-growing ants and their fungi. Science. 1994 Dec 9;266(5191):1691–1694. doi: 10.1126/science.266.5191.1691. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  2. Currie C. R., Stuart A. E. Weeding and grooming of pathogens in agriculture by ants. Proc Biol Sci. 2001 May 22;268(1471):1033–1039. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2001.1605. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  3. Currie Cameron R., Wong Bess, Stuart Alison E., Schultz Ted R., Rehner Stephen A., Mueller Ulrich G., Sung Gi-Ho, Spatafora Joseph W., Straus Neil A. Ancient tripartite coevolution in the attine ant-microbe symbiosis. Science. 2003 Jan 17;299(5605):386–388. doi: 10.1126/science.1078155. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  4. Farrell B. D., Sequeira A. S., O'Meara B. C., Normark B. B., Chung J. H., Jordal B. H. The evolution of agriculture in beetles (Curculionidae: Scolytinae and Platypodinae). Evolution. 2001 Oct;55(10):2011–2027. doi: 10.1111/j.0014-3820.2001.tb01318.x. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  5. Gomes De Siqueira C, Bacci M, Jr, Pagnocca FC, Bueno OC, Hebling MJA. Metabolism of plant polysaccharides by leucoagaricus gongylophorus, the symbiotic fungus of the leaf-cutting ant atta sexdens L . Appl Environ Microbiol. 1998 Dec;64(12):4820–4822. doi: 10.1128/aem.64.12.4820-4822.1998. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  6. Hafner M. S., Nadler S. A. Phylogenetic trees support the coevolution of parasites and their hosts. Nature. 1988 Mar 17;332(6161):258–259. doi: 10.1038/332258a0. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  7. Hibbett David S., Binder Manfred. Evolution of complex fruiting-body morphologies in homobasidiomycetes. Proc Biol Sci. 2002 Oct 7;269(1504):1963–1969. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2002.2123. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  8. Huelsenbeck J. P., Ronquist F. MRBAYES: Bayesian inference of phylogenetic trees. Bioinformatics. 2001 Aug;17(8):754–755. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/17.8.754. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  9. Moncalvo Jean-Marc, Vilgalys Rytas, Redhead Scott A., Johnson James E., James Timothy Y., Catherine Aime M., Hofstetter Valerie, Verduin Sebastiaan J. W., Larsson Ellen, Baroni Timothy J. One hundred and seventeen clades of euagarics. Mol Phylogenet Evol. 2002 Jun;23(3):357–400. doi: 10.1016/S1055-7903(02)00027-1. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  10. Mueller U. G., Schultz T. R., Currie C. R., Adams R. M., Malloch D. The origin of the attine ant-fungus mutualism. Q Rev Biol. 2001 Jun;76(2):169–197. doi: 10.1086/393867. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  11. Mueller UG, Rehner SA, Schultz TR. The evolution of agriculture in ants . Science. 1998 Sep 25;281(5385):2034–2038. doi: 10.1126/science.281.5385.2034. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  12. Posada D., Crandall K. A. MODELTEST: testing the model of DNA substitution. Bioinformatics. 1998;14(9):817–818. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/14.9.817. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  13. Schulz Contreras M., Gaitán Galarza V., Novelo Castro B. Regresión y cicatrización en tuberculosis pulmonar. Gac Med Mex. 1967 Nov;97(11):1447–1455. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  14. Zolan M. E., Pukkila P. J. Inheritance of DNA methylation in Coprinus cinereus. Mol Cell Biol. 1986 Jan;6(1):195–200. doi: 10.1128/mcb.6.1.195. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

Articles from Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences are provided here courtesy of The Royal Society

RESOURCES