General Characteristics
Following are some of the important characteristics of fungi.
Habitat:
They occupy a wide range of habitats, aquatic, terrestrial and as parasites on plants and animals.
Mode of Life:
They can be parasites, saprotrophs or mutualists.
Size:
They range in size from the unicellular yeasts to the large toad stool.
Nutrition:
They lack chlorophyll, so they are non-photosynthetic. Thus, mode of nutrition is heterotrophic. Digestion takes place outside the body and nutrients are absorbed directly.
Cell Walls:
Cell walls are rigid containing chitin as fibrillar material. It has a high tensile strength, gives shape to the hyphae and prevents osmotic bursting of the cells. Chitin is more resistant to decay than cellulose and lignin present inn the plant cell wall.
Food Storage:
If carbohydrate is stored, it is usually as glycogen and not starch.
Thallus:
The thallus or the body of most fungi is a multicellular structure known as mycelium. A mycelium consists of a network of filaments known as hyphae.
Hyphae give the mycelium quite a large surface area per volume of the cytoplasm, and this facilitates absorption of nutrients into body of the fungus.
Hyphae:
These are network of filaments. The hyphae may non-septate (a-septate) or septate. Non-septate hyphae have no cross walls, are multinucleated i.e; they have many nuclei in the cytoplasm such hyphae are called coenocytic hyphae. e.g. Rhizopus. Septate fungi have cross wall e.g. Penicillium.
Motility:
Fungi are non-motile, lack basal bodies and do not have flagella at any stage of their life cycle. They move towards a food source by growing towards it.
Reproduction
A fungus reproduces both A-Sexually and Sexually.
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