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How gene swapping helped build the planet's decomposers
- June 7, 2026 at 8:20 PM
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Decomposers are crucial for keeping Earth habitable, breaking down dead biomass and returning key nutrients, such as carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, to the ecosystem. Most decomposers, including fungi, survive through osmotrophy—a means of feeding by absorbing dissolved nutrients rather than engulfing prey. But how this method of feeding repeatedly arose across the eukaryotic tree of life remains unclear.
Originally published at Phys.org