Life

Mystery fungus seen at last
One of the dominant, but elusive, groups of fungi in soil has at last been grown in a lab culture.  What used to be called Soil Clone Group 1 turns up frequently when researchers analyze samples of earth for whatever fragments of DNA can be sequenced.  This group of soil fungi appears globally, but until now no one has grown any of the organisms or even seen what they look like. In the Aug. 12 Science, Anna Rosling of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala and an international team of collaborators report recovering a very slow-growing mass of tiny threadlike structures from tree root tips. Now work can begin on figuring out what the new fungal class, christened Archaeorhizomycetes, does. —Susan Milius

 

A really cool fan
A previously unknown species of sea lily has turned up at seamounts more than 1,600 meters below the waves at sites off Antarctica. A shirttail cousin to the starfish, the anchored organism sports what looks like a filter-feeding flower above a stalk that can be a half-meter long. The 46 sparsely planted juveniles and young adults seen by scientists from France and New Zealand belonged to a single species they dubbed Ptilocrinus amezianeae. In the September Polar Biology, the scientists report witnessing sea stars and urchins dining on the animals and conclude that the newly discovered population may not be around long as it appears to be “in decline.” —Janet Raloff

 

Learn from a germ
Giardia lamblia, a waterborne protozoan that’s responsible for gut-wrenching disease, also has sophisticated swimming skills, engineers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, report online August 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This germ has four pairs of paddling flagella, but each pair moves differently to fine-tune movement, video analyses show. Moreover, much of the bug’s major propulsion comes not from its oars but from wavelike motions in its tail end. The findings could inspire new propulsion systems for microrobots in nanomedicine, the authors say. They also suggest ways to block the germ’s attachment to the human gut. —Janet Raloff

 

Kazakh Big Bird
Judging by its jaw size, the bird now named Samrukia nessovi might have stood two or three meters tall if it was flightless. And if it could fly, the bird’s wingspan would have been more than three meters, Darren Naish of the University of Portsmouth in England and his colleagues report online August 11 in Biology Letters. Samrukia nessovi flew — or didn’t — in Central Asia about 85 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period of dinosaur glory. More than 100 bird species are known from dinosaur times, but almost all were little.—Susan Milius

Zinfandel’s roots
The modern Zinfandel grape may have roots in 15th century Croatia. Teasing DNA out of a 90-year-old herbarium specimen showed that an old vine identified as Tribidrag  matches the genetic profile of today’s Zinfandel grape, say Nenad Malenica of the University of Zagreb and colleagues. Tribidrag is a venerable lineage of vines that old records describe as flourishing in Croatia 600 years ago. Recovering antique DNA holds promise for restoring the lost history of grapes, the researchers say July 22 in Naturwissenschaften. They herald the Tribidrag work as the first success in genetically identifying the variety of an old herbarium vine. —Susan Milius