The ancestors of fungi are believed to be simple aquatic forms with flagellated spores, similar to members of the extant phylum Chytridiomycota (chytrids). Current classifications assume that chytrids form an early-diverging clade within the kingdom Fungi and imply a single loss of the spore flagellum, leading to the diversification of terrestrial fungi. Here we develop phylogenetic hypotheses for Fungi using data from six gene regions and nearly 200 species. Our results indicate that there may have been at least four independent losses of the flagellum in the kingdom Fungi. These losses of swimming spores coincided with the evolution of new mechanisms of spore dispersal, such as aerial dispersal in mycelial groups and polar tube eversion in the microsporidia (unicellular forms that lack mitochondria). The enigmatic microsporidia seem to be derived from an endoparasitic chytrid ancestor similar to Rozella allomycis, on the earliest diverging branch of the fungal phylogenetic tree.

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Four recent crystal structures of growth factors--nerve growth factor, transforming growth factor-beta, platelet-derived growth factor, and human chorionic gonadotropin--from four separate superfamilies revealed that these proteins are structurally related and share a common overall topology. These proteins have very little sequence homology, but they all have an unusual arrangement of six cysteines linked to form a "cystine-knot" conformation. The active forms of these proteins are dimers, either homo- or heterodimers. Despite the overall topological similarity between the monomers, the interfaces used to form the dimer are in each case quite different. Because the surfaces used for dimer formation are mostly hydrophobic, the uniqueness of each dimer accounts for the lack of sequence homology and raises questions about the effectiveness of reverse sequence fitting in this kind of structure as a predictor of structural homology.

Fifteen mutant strains of. Chlamydomonas reinhardi were isolated which showed defects in some aspect oi the process of cell-wall formation. Genetic analyses indicated that most of the mutations were due to single gene changes; two were anomalous in that non-Mendelian segregations were obtained on crossing with other genotypes, and on selfing they frequently gave rise to wild-type phenotypes.Occasional somatic revertants were also obtained from these two strains. On the basis of these analyses it is suggested that there are two levels of control operating in the process of cell wall biogenesis -one concerned with subunit production at the nuclear level and another, possibly concerned with three-dimensional organization, at another level. Electronmicroscope analyses of the different mutants showed the mutants to be divided into three main categories: those in which the wall was formed but was not attached to the plasma membrane, those in which the wall was attached to the membrane, and those in which very little wall was formed. In the last class in particular, vesicles containing wall precursors were clearly visible, and were shed through the plasma membrane into the medium.