One of the most amazing things abut ambrosia symbioses is that they have independently evolved de novo over and over again in both beetles and fungi. Huang et al. used carbon substrate phenotyping arrays and variation partitioning to analytically separate the effects of evolutionary history from transition to ambrosial life style on the kinds of carbon that various lineages of fungi can assimilate. We found that more than 50% of the variation in carbon type assimilation was explained by phylogenetic relationships among fungi, and after removing phylogenetic effects, 0% was explained by ambrosia vs. non-ambrosia life histories. Thus every one of the many independently evolved lineages of ambrosia fungi is functionally distinct, inheriting its metabolic capabilities from its most recent non-ambrosial ancestor!
See our new paper here – Huang_etal_2018
