Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

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.jp. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

Likens.

They're probably the most common example of two organisms living in a symbiotic relationship.

There's a fungus and a photosynthesizing partner like algae.

It's a bond that was born, as they say, when Alice algae took a lichen to Freddie fungus. But that simple description

covered up a larger mystery. How could two different lichen species combine the same building

blocks, same fungus, same algae? And yet they look very different. They have different chemistry,

and some of them even have distinctly different ecology. Toby Sprabilla, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Montana and the University of Graz in Austria.

He and his colleagues studied two lichen species that fit that bill.

Same underlying parts, different color and chemistry.

They ground the lichens up and then analyze their RNA.

And what they expected to find was two genomes, one fungus, one alga.

And what we found is that at the end of a lot of analysis, we had three genomes, not two,

and this was really surprising.

The third genome was from a type of yeast, and the more yeast present, the more yellowish and more toxic

the lichen was. The study appears in the journal Science. But how could scientists spend so many

years studying these lichens and still miss this crucial third species? Shprabilla says it could

...