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Ines Teichert, Stefanie Pöggeler, Minou Nowrousian

• Fruiting bodies are among the most complex multicellular structures formed by fungi, and the molecular mechanisms that regulate their development are far from understood. However, studies with a number of fungal model organisms have started to shed light on this developmental process. One of these model organisms is \(\textit {Sordaria macrospora}\), a filamentous ascomycete from the order \(\textit {Sordariales}\). This fungus has been a genetic model organism since the 1950s, but its career as a model organism for molecular genetics really took off in the 1990s, when the establishment of a transformation protocol, a mutant collection, and an indexed cosmid library provided the methods and resources to start revealing the molecular mechanisms of fruiting body development. In the 2000s, “omics” methods were added to the \(\textit {S. macrospora}\) tool box, and by 2020, 58 developmental genes have been identified in this fungus. This review gives a brief overview of major method developments for \(\textit {S. macrospora}\), and then focuses on recent results characterizing different processes involved in regulating development including several regulatory protein complexes, autophagy, transcriptional and chromatin regulation, and RNA editing.