Dictyonema is a genus of mainly tropical basidiolichens in the family Hygrophoraceae. Unlike most lichens, which contain fungi related to yeasts and molds, Dictyonema species contain fungi more closely related to mushrooms. The genus includes about 40 recognized species found mainly in tropical regions, ranging from lowland forests to high mountain elevations up to 4,300 meters in the Andes. These lichens come in various forms, from crusty patches to leaf-like structures to thread-like mats, and most grow on soil, rocks, moss, or rotting logs. One species from the Amazon rainforest has traditi
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Dictyonema is a genus of mainly tropical basidiolichens in the family Hygrophoraceae. Unlike most lichens, which contain fungi related to yeasts and molds, Dictyonema species contain fungi more closely related to mushrooms. The genus includes about 40 recognized species found mainly in tropical regions, ranging from lowland forests to high mountain elevations up to 4,300 meters in the Andes. These lichens come in various forms, from crusty patches to leaf-like structures to thread-like mats, and most grow on soil, rocks, moss, or rotting logs. One species from the Amazon rainforest has traditional use by indigenous peoples as a hallucinogenic substance in shamanic rituals.
==The Dictyonema symbiosis== Most lichens are a symbiosis between an ascomycete fungus and a photosynthetic green alga. However, a small percentage of lichens (approximately 10%) are cyanolichens and contain a photosynthetic cyanobacterium instead of green algae, and an even smaller number (less than 1%) are basidiolichens and contain a basidiomycete fungus instead of an ascomycete. This makes Dictyonema more closely related to mushroom-forming fungi than it is to most other lichens.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).