Dr. Corentin Loron

So fungi would be saprotrophic, so they will eat dead organic matter.

But if you're eight meter at a time where the only food source for you is small plants, you will not have enough to sustain something that big.

So that would be peculiar.

Another example is the reproductive structure that we still practice.

We still don't know how they were actually reproducing.

There's some ID, but this doesn't fit what we observe in some fungi.

So even if it is a fungi, then you're lacking some of the key parts to place it in one particular family within the fungi.

So everybody sort of agree on that.

But the great thing that we have, and you mentioned that, is that since 30 years, the techniques have evolved so much.

And what we can do now in those very well-preserved organisms, examples that I cited for example, is to look at the molecular signal on top of what the morphology is telling us.

And this is really what we wanted to carry with our work, which is, can we test the hypothesis that they were fungi using those new techniques coupled with the traditional approaches?

And the answer was like, no, we didn't find anything.

So it's not back to square one, but this is another sort of cross on the list, on the tick list of what they could be.

So they're two different, also, molecularly speaking, to be fungi.

So, yeah, here we go.

So obviously now we have also made incredible advance in genetic and all of those.

Sometimes concept of what we used to call supergroup is much less clear than it was before with categories that are very separate.

But

So we have the category like bacteria, eubacteria, part of the prokaryotic domain, by opposition to the eukaryotic domain, inside which you'll find the fungi, the animal, us, for example, being animal.

And within those eukaryotes, you can sort of vernacularly separate into a supergroup, which sometimes, like algae, doesn't really reflect anything genetically speaking because algae or green algae and red algae are very close to plants, but what we call brown algae are actually closer to other organisms completely unrelated to plants.