Sydney Glassman

They have thick bark.

Some plants even have cones that require heat in order to release their seeds.

So they actually require heat in order to reproduce plants.

So there's whole books on this.

We know a lot about plant adaptations to fire, but plants are all associated with microbes as well.

And these fungi and bacteria also have adaptations to fire.

And that's basically what my career is about.

What are these adaptations to fire and how are these microbes, both the bacteria and the fungi surviving and thriving after wildfires?

So what we did with this study is we sequenced their genomes.

And we found that they have a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them have a really increased genetic capacity to break down pyrogenic organic matter or charcoal.

So they have a lot of different genes and they've evolved the way to increase these genes in a lot of different ways.

One is by gene duplication.

So they basically just copy and paste genes

and replicate their genes.

So they have a lot more that enable them to break down charcoal.

Another is through sexual reproduction.

So when I teach mycology, some students always think like, oh, I didn't realize fungi had sex.

Actually, fungi have a lot of sex, and they have really different weird kinds of sex.

Yeah, they're really famous for having lots of weird types of sex.

They can have asexual and sexual reproduction.