Well, folks, it's taken me a while to jump back into permies as I have been super full of a bunch of other things, but when I read this exciting article I thought I really need to share it. Even though this is a 2016 article I had never heard of it, and I really love lichens so this is pretty cool to me in a super lichen nerdy kind of way! Interestingly for me, also, the findings were spurred on by the preliminary work of the somewhat
local to me, world-renowned, master lichenologist Trevor Goward and were discovered by one of his proteges who is local to the Permies base in Montana.
So the gist of the article is that rather than just having a fungal and algal symbiosis, as science had previously determined and which formed the definition of this large group of ancient species, it was recently discovered by Toby Spribille and John McCutcheon of the University of Montana that variation from the typical duo is due to the additional involvement forming a trinity by a type of yeast (hence the three sisters-which I shamelessly threw into the title for the sake of permies click bate! --Ha! ). This explained Goward's work that showed two types of lichen that had different DNA genetic expressions (one poisonous and the other edible), despite having the same genetic DNA structure between the Fungi and Algal partners. The first link will be the article done
online with CBC, and the second to the study published in Science. Peace, Wild thangs, and the continuous unfolding and expansion of understanding ~ Roberto.
CBC Article
Study published in SCIENCE
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."-Margaret Mead "The only thing worse than being blind, is having sight but no vision."-Helen Keller