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How fungal spores achieve zero drag

UC BERKELEY (US) — Drafting cyclists have nothing on spore-spewing fungi. Using an aerodynamic technique, a fungus can reduce drag on its spores—sending them high and far.

One fungus, the destructive Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, spews thousands of spores nearly simultaneously to form a plume that reduces drag to nearly zero and even creates a wind that carries many of the spores 20 times farther than a single spore could travel alone, according to a new study by mathematicians and biologists from the University of California, Berkeley, Cornell University, and Harvard University.

“In the Tour de France, riders form a peloton that can reduce air drag by 40 percent,” says co-lead author Marcus Roper, a postdoctoral researcher in the mathematics department at UC Berkeley. “The ascospores of Sclerotinia do the peloton perfectly, reducing air drag to zero and sculpting a flow of air that carries them even farther.”

Presumably, this strategy helps the fungi get their spores off the ground into the foliage of their host plants, or into airstreams that can carry them to host plants, the scientists say.

“I realized that the spores behaved much like cloud droplets. To follow their paths, I adapted algorithms I had developed to describe cloud formation,” adds co-lead author Agnese Seminara, a postdoctoral researcher and theoretical physicist at Harvard.

In a few tenths of a second, the fungus Sclerotinia expels hundreds of thousands of spores in a plume that can rise 10 cm, much higher than any single spore by itself. At right, the spores ejected first (blue) do not travel far, but they create a wind that carries spores released milliseconds later (yellow) much higher, and the final spores (red) even higher. Filmed at 3,000 frames per second. (Credit: Mahesh Bandi, Agnese Seminara/Harvard University and Marcus Roper/UC Berkeley)

The synchronized ejection of spores from the coprophilic fungus Ascobolus furfuraceus, filmed at 1,000 frames per second. The spores are black specks, which disappear when the spores are ejected. The spore sacs eject their spores in a wave that travels outward from the first few sacs to pop. (Credit: Marcus Roper/UC Berkeley)

Roper, Seminara, and colleagues report the findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“These findings could have implications for methods of controlling the spread of fungal pathogens,” says senior author Anne Pringle, associate professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard. “Sclerotinia alone costs U.S. farmers on the order of $1 billion annually, including costs of controlling the fungus and crop losses.


Researchers in the field of bioballistics—how plants, fungi, and animals accelerate seeds, spores, or even parts of their body to high speed—have found an amazing variety of techniques to overcome friction with the air, the main limitation for small spores and seeds.

“Understanding how Sclerotinia is discharging its spores and getting them onto the plants will eventually lead us to new ways of looking at plant architecture,” says co-author Helene Dillard, a plant pathologist at Cornell.

“When plant breeders are developing new varieties of crops—such as beans, cabbage or sunflowers—they can keep in mind how Sclerotinia gets the spores to reach their targets, which is usually the flowers.”

Scientists have recognized for more than 100 years that many spore-producing fungi—the ascomycetes—release their spores in plumes that carry them long distances. More than 50 years ago, scientists noted that these spore plumes create a wind of their own, but the physics of the plumes was not understood, Roper says.


With training in the mathematics and physics of fluid flow, Roper and Seminara decided to investigate in collaboration with Pringle, a Harvard mycologist.

For the current PNAS paper, the researchers used high-speed video to clock the speed of spores ejected by Sclerotinia, finding that they are expelled at a speed of about 8.4 meters per second (19 miles per hour). However, because the spores are so small—10 microns long—air drag brings them to a stop in a mere 3 millimeters. When thousands of spores are ejected at the same time, however, some can travel more than 100 millimeters, or 4 inches.

These high-speed video images enabled Roper and Seminara to model spore plume movement precisely with standard equations of hydrodynamics. They showed that the thousands of spores ejected at the same time quickly eliminate all drag and allow the spores to travel about a centimeter, by which time the wind generated by the spores captures and whisks them to a speed of 60 centimeters per second. Their upward motion is stopped only by gravity, Roper says.

The added range from “hydrodynamic cooperation” allows fungi on the ground to shoot their spores into flowers or plant wounds, whence they can quickly spread throughout the plant and kill it.

Often called white mold, Sclerotinia rot, or wilt, the fungus attacks more than 400 species of plants, Dillard says, including beans, sunflowers, soybeans, canola, and peanuts, and can wipe out entire fields.

In spring and summer, the fungus produces cups (apothecia) about one-half centimeter across that spew spores into the air to infect plants. The fungus produces overwintering seed-like bodies called sclerotia on the infected plant tissues.

“It grows across a cabbage head and produces these small sclerotia that look like mouse droppings,” Dillard says. “The sclerotia fall on the ground, and are then in position to initiate the infection process the following year.”

The researchers were also curious how fungi manage to eject their spores simultaneously. To investigate this, they grew another mold, a coprophilic fungus from the genus Ascobolus, on horse dung and focused their high-speed video camera on the two-millimeter, cup-shaped fruiting body containing tens of thousands of spore sacs (asci), each containing eight spores.


“What looks like a plume is actually a series of sheets going off,” Roper says.

By tweaking their mathematical model to take account of this, Roper and Seminara discovered that cooperative ejection in sheets is a highly effective method for shooting spores long distances.


The work was funded by a Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science Fellowship to Roper, a Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Union Framework 7 to Seminara, and Harvard University.

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