What makes mushrooms different from plants?

Mushrooms are the most ancient inhabitants of the Earth. They number 1.5 million species, divided into 36 classes. It's not just the hats that we used to wear, but also yeast, mold, and much, much more. Mushrooms can live in the dark, without oxygen, in a moist and dry environment, in water and inside organisms. In this article, we'll talk about what mushrooms are different from plants.

Differences of fungi from plants

Until the 70s of the last century, mushrooms were consideredinferior plants. But when such branches of science as molecular phylogenetics and genosystematics appeared, scientists divided the entire living world into three groups: animals, plants and mushrooms. Those. mushrooms, even at the molecular level, radically differ from plants and animals. Read more about this in the article What are fungi. We will not understand the molecular structure, let's see what properties distinguish fungi from plants.

Fungi do not have chlorophyll, so they can notto draw energy directly from sunlight, like plants. For life, fungi need organic substances: plant and animal remains, products of their vital activity or even living organisms on which they can successfully parasitize. Read about this in the article How Mushrooms Grow.

Plants reproduce by means of seeds or vegetatively - by cuttings. The mushrooms for breeding purposes are spores. More on this - in the article How mushrooms multiply.

Curiously, although the number of species of fungi is much greater than that of plants, the total biomass of plants on Earth is greater than the total mass of fungi.