Breaking News:How fire-loving fungi evolved to digest charcoal– What Just Happened

When a wildfire tears through a landscape, most life retreats or disappears. Plants burn. Animals flee. The soil itself is left dark, dry, and stripped of easy nutrients. And yet, within weeks, tiny fungi begin to appear.

Bright orange cups. Invisible threads spreading underground. Life returning where it seems least possible.

Scientists have known about these so-called fire-loving fungi for years. What they did not know until now was how they did it.

A new study from the University of California, Riverside, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uncovers the genetic strategies that allow these fungi to survive fire, feast on charcoal, and quietly reshape burned ecosystems. And some of those strategies are surprisingly clever.

Wildfires are becoming more frequent and more intense across the globe, burning nearly four percent of Earth’s land surface each year. Beyond the visible damage, fire radically changes what is happening below our feet.

Soil microbes are wiped out. Carbon and nitrogen are rearranged. What remains is a strange buffet dominated by charcoal, chemically complex, energy-rich, and hard to digest.

For most organisms, it is useless.

For pyrophilous fungi, it is dinner.

Sydney Glassman, an associate professor of microbiology and plant pathology at UC Riverside, has spent years studying what happens in soil after fire. She and her team noticed something puzzling. Many of the fungi that explode in numbers after wildfires are almost impossible to detect before a fire. They are there. Quiet. Waiting.

“We knew some fungi could tolerate heat, others could grow fast once competitors were gone, and some could eat charcoal,” Glassman explained. “What we did not know was how all of that was encoded in their genomes.”

So the team went looking. Over five years, researchers collected fungi from seven wildfire sites across California. They isolated 18 species belonging to eight major fungal orders and sequenced their genomes in great detail. Then they tested how those fungi behaved when fed charcoal made from burned organic matter.

What emerged was not a single solution but several evolutionary paths to the same problem.

How do you survive fire, then make a living from ash?

One strategy is brute force at the genetic level. Some fungi, particularly in the Aspergillus and Penicillium groups, use gene duplication. Think of it as a biological copy-and-paste.

The fungi duplicate genes that code for enzymes capable of breaking down complex, charcoal-like molecules.

More copies mean more enzymes. More enzymes mean better digestion of burned material rich in carbon. There is a trade-off, though.

These fungi grow slowly. Building and regulating all that molecular machinery costs energy. In the fungal world, you cannot have everything. Other fungi take a different route.

Mushroom-forming groups, including those related to morels and other Basidiomycota, rely on sexual reproduction. By recombining genes during mating, they quickly generate diversity, producing new combinations that can withstand postfire conditions.

These fungi often grow faster but invest less in the heavy genetic toolkit needed to digest the toughest charcoal compounds. They arrive early, take advantage of easy nutrients, and move on.

It is an ecological succession at the microbial scale. Then there was the surprise. One fungus, Coniochaeta hoffmannii, appeared to be cheating. Instead of slowly evolving new abilities, it borrowed them.

The team found clear evidence that this fungus acquired key genes for digesting charcoal directly from bacteria, through a process known as horizontal gene transfer. It is common in bacteria. It is rare in fungi. Very rare.

“This is like sharing genes with a neighbor instead of inheriting them from your parents,” Glassman said. “Cross-kingdom gene transfer almost never happens, which is why this caught our attention.”

The borrowed genes appear to give the fungus a major advantage in breaking down burn scars. Fire survival itself also came into focus.

Some fungi form sclerotia, dense, heat-resistant structures that sit dormant underground for decades. Others simply live deeper in the soil, insulated from extreme temperatures, then race upward once the fire passes.

One well-known fire fungus, Pyronema, lacks many genes for digesting charcoal. Instead, it grows incredibly fast, forming tiny orange cup-shaped mushrooms across burned ground while competitors are gone. Different tools. Same goal. Survive. Spread. Persist.

One of the most important findings of the study is the clear trade-off between speed and specialization.

Fungi that invest heavily in genes for breaking down aromatic carbon grow slowly. In contrast, fungi that grow quickly tend to use simpler resources and appear early after a fire.

This balance helps explain why postfire landscapes are not dominated by one species. Instead, different waves of fungi emerge over time. Each type shapes soil chemistry in its own way.

Together, they affect how carbon and nitrogen move through ecosystems after a fire. This has consequences for climate, plant recovery, and long-term soil health.

Why is this important beyond burned forests?

Charcoal is chemically similar to many pollutants that humans find difficult to remove, such as oil residues, industrial waste, and mining byproducts.

If fungi can digest wildfire charcoal, they may be able to digest those too.

“There are a lot of ways these genes could be harnessed,” Glassman said. “From cleaning up oil spills to restoring burned or polluted soils. This is still a new area, but the potential is there.”

For decades, fire ecology has focused mostly on plants. Which species return? Which seeds survive? How do forests regrow?

This research reminds us that recovery also depends on the invisible.

Fungi that wait patiently underground. Genes are copied, reshuffled, or borrowed across kingdoms. Metabolic trade-offs refined over millions of years.

After the flames pass, they get to work. Quietly turning ash back into life.

Journal Reference

1. Sari, E., Enright, D. J., Ordoñez, M. E., Allison, S. D., Homyak, P. M., Wilkins, M. J., & Glassman, S. I. (2026). Gene duplication, horizontal gene transfer, and trait trade-offs drive evolution of postfire resource acquisition in pyrophilous fungi. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(1), e2519152123. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2519152123