The poetry of mycological accomplishment and challenge

Adaptation is the evolutionary process that has given us the remarkable diversity of fungi and I cannot think of a theme better suited to bringing together the wide variety of topics at this congress: pathogenicity, cell biology, genomics, evolution and ecology. It is also a timely theme because the latest biological innovation, genomics, has stimulated new thinking about the types of genetic variation and subsequent selection that enable adaptation. For more than half a century the Modern Synthesis of natural selection and genetics has provided the framework for evolutionary inquiry as reviewed by Kutschera and Niklas (2004). The Modern Synthesis is focused on point mutations as the mode of genetic variation, but genomics has emphasized the role of gene loss and gene gain by duplication or horizontal transfer in generating genetic variation. Likely, the Modern Synthesis can be stretched to accommodate these new processes, as it was to accommodate neutral evolution (Pigliucci, 2007). However, there are those who are calling for a new synthesis and I encourage mycologists to take a look at these proposals because fungi may be the organisms of choice in testing these ideas (Koonin, 2009a and Koonin, 2009b).