Q.Write the role of fungi in our daily life.

Fungi store their reserve food as glycogen, not starch.

Plants and most algae store their carbohydrate reserve as starch, a polymer of glucose. Fungi, however, are more similar to animals in their storage chemistry: they store their reserve food as glycogen, a highly branched glucose polymer identical in structure to the glycogen found in the liver and muscle of animals. This is one of several biochemical features (along with chitinous cell walls) that place Fungi in their own kingdom rather than with plants.

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Multicellular, heterotrophic organisms with chitinous cell walls belong to Kingdom Fungi.

In the five-kingdom classification of Whittaker, the organisms that are eukaryotic, mostly multicellular, heterotrophic (they absorb food, being saprophytes or parasites), and possess cell walls made of chitin (a complex polysacc …

Fungi are heterotrophic.

Fungi lack chlorophyll, so they cannot photosynthesise. They obtain nourishment from dead organic matter (saprophytic) or from living hosts (parasitic) — i.e. they are heterotrophic. Hence the mode of nutrition in fungi is he …

Fungi lack chlorophyll and absorb organic nutrients → heterotrophic → (a).

As described for Kingdom Fungi in the NCERT Class 11 Biology chapter on Biological Classification:

• Fungi have no chlorophyll, so they cannot perform photosynthesis (ruling out photo-autotrophic and chemo-autotrophic).
• They obtain nutrition by absorption of organic material — as saprophytes (on dead matter), parasites (on living hosts) or symbionts (lichens, mycorrhizae). …

Yeast (Saccharomyces) is unicellular; the other three listed fungi are all multicellular/filamentous.

Most fungi are filamentous (made of hyphae forming a mycelium), but a few, like yeast, exist as single cells that reproduce by budding.

• (a) Yeast -- unicellular, used in fermentation/baking.
• (b) Agaricus -- the common mushroom, a large multicellular basidiomycete. …

Penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming from Penicillium, a genus of fungi, and remains the classic textbook example of a fungus-derived antibiotic.

Fungi like Penicillium produce antibiotic compounds as secondary metabolites; Penicillium notatum (and later Penicillium chrysogenum for industrial production) yields penicillin, which inhibits bacterial cell wall synthesis. This discovery revolutionised medicine and is a standard example used to illustrate the economic/medical importance of the fungal ki …